Market Sizing: How many ambulances are there in a country

Question

I tried to solve this with average number of ambulance ride needed per lifespan per person divided by the drives per ambulance per day, but the number is always way too low.

Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Hi!

I actually like the idea of estimating it through the ambulance rides per lifespan. But if you are not getting close to the result, maybe you could try to estimate it through hospital beds per 1,000 people (something we see quite often on the news right now). Let's take Germany as an example:

~10 beds per 1,000 people
Around 80,000 hospital beds for the country (population of ~ 80 Mio)
Avg number of beds in a hospital = maybe ~50?
# of hospitals in Germany (80,000 / 50) = 1,600
Ambulances per hospital = maybe 20?
Total = ~ 30,000 ambulances in Germany

I just checked the statistics and it's actually 21,000 ambulances :D so, the approach seems to work! But remember – it doesn't matter that much that you get the right result – what matters is that you can build an understandable calculation logic, which you have successfully managed to do with your lifespan example.

Best,
Daniel

Answer 2

Hello!

I think the most straight-forward methodology would be calculating the average number of ambulances per hospital/medical center, and then multiply by the total numer of them:

Calcultion of number of medical centers, divided into:
- Big medical hubs, that would have their own ambulance fleet
- Smaller/rural medical hub, that would share one vehicle
Calculation of average ambulance fleet/center:
- Big hubs: 3-4 on average
- Small hubs: 0.3-0.5 on average

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

Answer 3

Hi,

I would suggest that you should present your own approach and I would be happy to review.

Meanwhile please see below my approach to segmentation in market sizing as well as examples of solved cases:

B2C:
-Demographics (Age, education, income, family size, race, gender, occupation, nationality)
-Behavioral (Purchasing behavior, customer journey stage, occasion & timing,
customer loyalty & interest, risk tolerance, user status)
-Psychographic (Lifestyle, personality traits, values, opinions, interests of consumers)
-Geographic (Geographical boundaries)

B2B:
-Company characteristics (Industry, company size, number of employees)
-Geography (Geographical boundaries)
-Purchasing Approach (Occasion & timing, customer capabilities, nature of existing relationship)
-Personal Characteristics (Loyalty, risk attitude, user status)

B2G:
-Demographics (Type of agency, size of budget, the amount of autonomy)
-Geographic (Geographical boundaries)
-Government Tier (Federal , State, Local, Quasi-governmental, International)
-Bid type (Closed, Open)

But sometimes you don’t need to segmentation. Here is an example of case that could be solved with high level top down approach - estimate the size of credit card market in the US:

https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/how-should-i-approach-the-following-question-estimate-the-market-size-of-credit-cards-in-the-us-6695