What does a sector report actually tell you about your market?
A sector report reads a whole market in one place: every company that can be found, the accounts of the leading ones, the trade figures, the rules and the news. It tells an owner where the money is moving, who they are really up against, what it takes to trade, and where the market is getting harder. Each piece exists somewhere. Almost none of it has been read together.
What went into it
PeakRatio has just completed a full sector report on one Scottish market. It was researched independently of any company in the market: company listings across seven Scottish areas, filed accounts, trade statistics, the standards the sector works to, funding schemes and two years of sector news.
The numbers give a sense of the scale. 411 companies found across seven Scottish areas. 22 leading companies profiled by name, tiered from the Scotland-wide incumbents down to the regional and local firms. 17 exhibits. Every claim tagged one of three ways: sourced, with the page linked at the point of the claim; an inference, written as a reading rather than a fact; or a named gap, where the format asks for something no source yet holds.
That last tag matters. A report that says where it could not find an answer is one an owner can trust on the answers it did find.
Three things the report found
The money is moving. New-build completions in Scotland fell 13% in 2025, with starts at their lowest since records began (Scottish Government housing statistics). At the same time, public bodies are letting multi-year programmes in the same sector worth tens of millions of pounds. The private job and the public programme are two different markets, and they favour different kinds of business.
The supply base has consolidated. The number of active manufacturers in this sector in the UK has fallen from about 4,000 twenty years ago to about 1,100 today (industry data, 2025). Fewer suppliers means the terms follow, and any business buying from that layer is negotiating with a smaller, stronger set of counterparties than it was a decade ago.
Winning work is getting harder while order values rise. A third of the businesses surveyed reported higher order values in the last year, and a similar share said new business is harder to win, with around £100m a year now being spent on digital advertising across the sector (a 2025 trade survey of more than 2,000 businesses). Bigger jobs, fought harder for, at a rising cost of acquisition.
Each of the three traces to its source. What an owner rarely has is the three of them, and the forty other findings around them, read together and set against their own business.
Why this matters in any sector
The findings above are about one sector, but the mechanism travels. A software business watching its customers consolidate, a food producer watching supermarket buying move to fewer, larger contracts, an engineering firm watching public procurement favour framework holders: each is the same shape. The market a business thinks it is in and the one the money is moving to can be two different places, and the gap between them is usually visible in the sources long before it shows up in the order book.
A business that knows the market it is in is easier to run, because the owner is making decisions against the real landscape rather than the remembered one. It is also worth more to whoever buys it, because a buyer is paying for future cashflow and how little risk sits on it, and a business that can show where its market is going carries less risk than one that cannot. If the owner never sells, the work still paid for itself in better decisions.
What a sector report is for
The report is the foundation, not the end. Once the market is laid out, the business can be read against it: where it sits, which customers it is built for, and where it should be aiming. That is the work behind two recent pieces on where your business actually sits in the market and knowing who your ideal client is. The research is what makes those answers specific rather than a feeling.
The same read can now be built for any sector. If your market is moving the way this one is, and you are thinking about stepping back at some point, send me a message on LinkedIn and we will talk through what that read would look like for your business. For a quick first read on where your own business stands, the free Ratio Check takes five minutes.
The Ratio Check is a free, five-minute read of where your business stands, and the best place to start.