The Aircraft Electronics Association used the occasion of the 56th annual AEA International Convention and Trade Show to introduce its first Avionics Market Report, an accounting of what participating OEMs sold in the previous year. Nineteen OEMs participated in this year’s report, including Bendix/King, Garmin, Rockwell Collins and Honeywell Business & General Aviation. The gross sales for last year, including forward fit and retrofit units sold, totaled $6.3 billion, according to the report.

Paula Derks, the organization’s president, told AIN, “This is a brand-new report. Years ago we did a bimonthly retrofit sales survey, but the data was dependent upon avionics shops reporting their sales for the preceding 60 days. We offered prizes and other incentives to get them to send in the reports, but participation kept decreasing until only 20 percent of the market was reporting.”

For the past year Derks has been working with the OEMs instead of individual avionics shops to develop a market report based on actual production figures.

“We started contacting OEMs last June, all of them, not just our member companies, and asked them what they sold. Since the information is considered confidential by the OEMs we had a third-party CPA collect the data and remove the identifiers to maintain confidentiality,” she said.

The association estimates “there are probably another 20 or 30 OEMs” it is pursuing to get full manufacturer participation. “This kind of data will help the industry in general and our dealers specifically when they go to the bank or talk with venture capitalists,” Derks said.