Exploring the risers and fallers in the March 2020 Retail Sales figures
Earlier this week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released their latest retail sales figure. You can see the data release here in their “Retail Turnover 8501.0" tables: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8501.0. They actually announced this a few weeks ago in the news showing that average growth from February 2020 to March 2020 was 8.5%.
As per the norm, the data is available in Excel format but it’s always easier to explore these things visually so let’s take a look. Once again, I’ve taken the data and turned it into a mini app which you can access below. We’ll use this app to look at what’s been growing and what hasn’t in terms of industry sub-groups which are part of table 12 of that ABS release.
The App
You can access the app here: LINK
Features of the App
This one is quite simple as it has just 2 menus, “Ranks” and “Historic Trends”. Both pages have a sub-group filter and date filter at the top of the page too.
RANKS
The Ranks showcases 2 bar charts. The first is the Seasonally Adjusted value of the industry sub-groups as at the latest filtered period (March 2020 in this example) and ranked in order from highest to lowest. The second bar chart looks at the year-over-year percentage of those sub-groups.
Up to the end of March 2020, the highest growth was seen in Liquor Retailing (+36% y/y), Pharmaceutical, Cosmetic and Toiletry Goods (+29% y/y) and Food Retailing (+27% y/y). Note that food retailing is not cafes or restaurants as they have their own category. In fact, they’re at the other end of the scale at -31.5% y/y growth.
Additionally, users can hover over each bar graph to see a mini preview of what the trend was over a period of time (this is dictated by the date filter). In this example we are hovering over the year-on-year trend bar for Food Retailing and can see that this was trending downward until the precipitous rise in March 2020.
Historic Trend
To look at how these trends played out over time we go to the Historic Trend menu option. We can choose a sub-group from the drop-down filter and pick a period of time. The top chart showcases what the trend has been for the seasonally adjusted value (in $millions) for the sub-group. Below that we see the same chart but this time as a year-on-year percentage.
Below we can see the precipitous growth in Liquor retailing from the year 2000 till now (the data does go back to 1982).
So feel free to check out the app and head to the ABS to explore more economic datasets.
Get in touch
For more information about this app or other things data analytics related, feel free to get in touch with me below.
Mark Monfort (Head of Data Analytics and Technology, Prosperity Advisers)
- Phone: 02 8262 8700
- Email: mmonfort@prosperity.com.au
