Just out of interest, I’ve taken the by-year list of serial numbers on the Naim website and plotted a (fairly crude) bar chart of how many serial numbers were issued in each calendar year, and it’s got some mildly interesting patterns:
This is not a direct measure of turnover or even how busy the factory/company has been - one serial number can be for an S1 or a Nova, requiring very different amounts of time and money, and it takes no account of R&D work - but it does give a rough insight into how many pieces of kit have been churned out per year
Olive kit was introduced in the ?mid-90s, which perhaps explains the rise in 93-95, but any reason for the early-90s dip? Effects of the recession?
The introduction of the Classic black kit (early 2000s) doesn’t seem to have caused a big jump in a short space of time, as might be expected
Any reasons for the big jump in 2013 followed by such a big dip?
Nice to see numbers on the rise during the pandemic and record numbers in 2021!
When did MuSo come onto the market?
Could that have been the 2013 spike, as it was being sold through a broader customer channel?
Currys, Richer Sounds et al were early adopters, I’m just not sure if that fits the time line…
I like your thinking, but wasn’t the Muso a bit later than that - 2015/6, perhaps?
The first generation Uniti also might have caused a spike, but I think that was more like 2010ish and I’m not sure what came in between. The years fly by…
All muso are made in China and have a different serial number range. So these aren’t included in the chart.
Statement serial numbers are assigned in batches in advance so the back plates can be made; I don’t recall how many are assigned at once, but they are not all used up in a year. It probably doesn’t make a huge difference to the yearly numbers.
The last serial number of 2020 is also 4000 higher than the first one of 2021. Could be a typo or some other oddity, but that makes the production for both years questionable.
I think that this was down to s/n allocations and part-builds that had to be held due to certain part delays from the component supply chain crisis. When I queried, Naim confirmed that the numbers were correct despite the apparent discrepancy.
