The Baby Season

Every business is cyclical - and most are seasonal. Even the baby business it seems! A number of Amárach's clients provide goods and services to young families, including those with babies and toddlers. So we recently analysed monthly data for births (kindly supplied by the National Maternity and Rotunda Hospitals in Dublin) to get a better understanding of the seasonality of the 'baby market'.

The chart shows the combined total number of births in the two hospitals (which together accounted for 85% of births in Dublin in 2006 by our calculation, using data from the CSO). A clear seasonal pattern is evident, as summarised in the table below which indexes each month's births against the average across all months (2006-2009):

	Births as % of Monthly Average
January	94.7%
February	86.8%
March	99.5%
April	95.4%
May	102.2%
June	101.4%
July	106.0%
August	108.5%
September	104.4%
October	106.1%
November	100.1%
December	102.1%

Births in February are over 13% below the monthly average, those in August nearly 9% above the average. Clearly in the case of the former the onset of spring nine months earlier seems to have the opposite effect of those normally attributed to the season! Whereas the shorter days/longer nights of October/November play their part in the birth peak nine months later ...