Predicting Cigar Sales Using Search

"If you can predict the future better than other people, you will soon become rich. If you can know better than other people what is happening right now, that is almost as good. After all, if no one else finds out the truth until a month after the fact, the present might as well be the future — nobody knows it." Steven D. Levitt (Author of Freakonomics)

Habanos SA, a joint venture between Cuba and Imperial Tobacco Group, registered an 8% fall in overseas sales of Cuban cigars in 2009. Consultants Bain also report an 8% decline in sales in the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland.

Highlighting the effectiveness of using search volumes as a tool for predicting the present, global searches also fell 8% in 2009.

Using Google Insights for Search forecasting tool we can predict that Cuban cigar sales will fall a further 7% in 2010.