Wholesale Sales MoM

Wholesale Sales MoM is the % change from 1 month to the prior month for wholesale merchant sales, seasonally adjusted and stated in current dollars. Seasonal adjustment removes normal calendar and holiday effects, while current dollars mean sales at actual selling prices without inflation removal.

StatCan, the national statistical office, compiles it through the Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey, called MWTS, from surveyed firms plus tax file models. It covers firms coded 410000 to 419999 across Canada, but excludes retail sales, oilseed and grain, petroleum products, agents and brokers. Answering is mandatory, and small firms are covered by tax file models.

Collection starts about 7 working days after month end and runs through the rest of that month by questionnaire and phone. StatCan publishes the result in The Daily at 830 am Eastern time about 6 to 8 weeks after month end.

Each release revises prior month raw data and prior 3 months of adjusted values after an early estimate from about 60 to 70% response. Once a year with February data, StatCan revises months of prior years, rarely back more than 3 years. Each release adds industry and province sales, inventories, the stock to sales ratio and volume, where gains mean stronger activity and drops mean weaker activity.

StatCan groups wholesale into 7 subsectors with no fixed weights, and each month reports how many moved.

• Food, beverage and tobacco: large consumer linked group tied to grocery and drink demand.
• Personal and household goods: consumer goods group tied to home and clothing demand.
• Motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts and accessories: high value volatile group tied to auto sales and output.
• Building material and supplies: construction linked group tied to building and renovation work.
• Machinery, equipment and supplies: capital goods group tied to business investment in gear.
• Miscellaneous including farm products: frequent swing source covering farm products other than oilseed and grain, farm supplies, metals and other goods.

For example, June 2023 sales excluding petroleum, petroleum products, other hydrocarbons, oilseed and grain fell 2.8% to 80.5 billion Canadian dollars after a May gain. The release of August 16, 2023 also showed a 0.4% drop from a year earlier and a 3.7% fall in constant dollar sales. Miscellaneous fell 7.3% to 10.3 billion led by farm goods down 19.4% to 3.3 billion. Machinery fell 4.2% to 17.8 billion and motor vehicles fell 3.1% to 13.2 billion.

Alberta fell 14.3% to 8.5 billion, Saskatchewan fell 15.7% to 3.0 billion and Ontario fell 0.7% to 42.1 billion. Inventories fell 1.2% to 127.7 billion while the ratio rose from 1.54 to 1.59. The lesson is that one strong month can reverse fast and value alone can understate real weakness.

1. Stratification: split the wholesale population into surveyed groups and a tax modelled group for small firms.
2. Horvitz-Thompson estimation: weight each sampled sale by the inverse of its selection chance, then sum by industry and area. Small firm sales come from monthly tax models.
3. Inventories: estimate surveyed stock from the sales sample and model small firm stock from peers and prior values.
4. Seasonal adjustment: extend the raw series since April 2008 with the X12-ARIMA method, strip calendar effects and force yearly totals to match.
5. Headline % change: take 100 times current month sales minus prior month sales divided by prior month sales.
6. Volume and example: deflate sales with price indexes to a chained 2012 base. For example, 80484 minus 82843 is minus 2359, and 100 times minus 2359 over 82843 is minus 2.8%. In volume terms, 60201 against 62528 is minus 3.7%.