SOURCE: Fuld & Co.

June 19, 2007 10:30 ET

Corporate Spending on Competitive Intelligence Projected to Rise Ten-Fold, to $10 Billion, in Five Years

CAMBRIDGE, MA--(Marketwire - June 19, 2007) - America's largest 1,000 companies are expected to increase their spending on staff and activities associated with Competitive Intelligence to at least $10 billion by 2012, from current spending of about $1 billion. The projections are based on data from the recent Global Benchmark Study of 141 corporations carried out by Fuld & Company, a consulting firm specializing in competitive intelligence.

According to Leonard Fuld, president of Fuld & Company, "This is the first-ever serious estimate and projection of CI expenditures by the Fortune 1000 companies." He noted that the estimate of $1 billion currently being spent on CI describes internal staff expenditures only and does not include costs associated with use of outside consultants, subscriptions, or database services.

"As a means of comparison, this number was close to zero only twenty years ago, when whatever monies spent in this arena were usually buried within the market research or perhaps strategic planning budgets," Fuld states.

The Fuld & Company Global Benchmark Study on corporate intelligence programs worldwide included mostly large Fortune 1000-class corporations. Respondents to the survey provided budget ranges for their CI programs.

According to Fuld, "To produce this estimate, we aligned each of the Fortune 1,000 sectors with the five major industry categories in our Global Benchmark Study. Industry sectors, as analyzed in the study, varied widely in their CI expenditures. For example, the pharmaceutical industry has the largest percentage of world class corporate intelligence programs, in contrast to the financial services and legal industries, which doll out the lowest budgets and contain an extraordinarily high percentage of very basic, poorly functioning competitive intelligence programs. We then applied this range of CI spending to the Fortune 1,000 list."

Fuld & Company Inc. (www.fuld.com) is the world's preeminent research and consulting firm in the field of business and competitive intelligence. It has offices in Cambridge, MA, and London.