Industry sales trends

[mar13]

I thought I'd post some articles for thought out here to counter the lower volume of discussions that seem to coincide with our longer days and warming weather.

I found the following two links:

Sales trends:
https://www.hpba.org/Resources/Annual-Historical-Hearth-Shipments

and

Trade article with more about sales trends and adapting to EPA2020 :
(broken link removed)

I'll throw in my 2 cents, coming from a person with very little knowledge on the topic....

1. Sales of wood stoves are down and EPA2020 a challenge, so perhaps some industry consolidation ahead of us?
   
2. It seems like gas inserts is one way the industry is diversifying to ride and survive the market trends.
   
3. The company spokespeople also seem more optimistic in the second link than what I'd expect after looking at the data in the first link.
   
4. The second link makes it sound like the EPA list of stoves will start quickly adding on newly qualified 2020 stoves.

Those are just my first impressions from scanning these links.