The industry analysis portfolio is a new one within HAL. It addresses one of the persistent issues within horticulture: a lack of usable information.
Horticulture is diverse and is also one of the few agriculture industries that are growing but faces falling terms of trade, a lack of competitiveness, fragmentation and a lack of information.

HAL is working in partnership with horticulture to capitalize on these strengths and address these weaknesses. It is doing this by aiming to maximize long term returns on research and marketing projects, offering a powerful information offer and being a capable organization. In order to achieve these goals, this plan proposes that the industry analysis portfolio will have four main tasks:

• collation of information and development of a storage and analysis capability;
• calculation of the gross value of production (GVP) figures for horticulture;
• developing strategic, industry and project business cases; and
• planning, implementing and management of economic analysis projects;

The four tasks have their own goals, business cases, strategies and KPIs, but in reality they are interlinked and rely on the results from the other tasks. The information storage and analysis task will provide information and analysis offer to horticulture but will also provide an information database that forms the foundation for the other tasks. The GVP calculation task will take information from the database to calculate the GVP forecasts and feed the GVP forecasts back into database. The business case development task will use information and analysis from the database as well as the GVP forecasts to develop situational analysis for the business cases.

The Industry Analysis portfolio seeks to ensure horticulture has access to better data on which to base business and investment decisions, including real time data analysis and forecasting for anyone with an internet connection. More accurate Gross Value of Production (GVP) figures which will produce more appropriate funding for HAL. Finally, proper business cases will produce higher quality and more relevant strategic planning and projects which will maximise returns to horticulture from research, development and marketing investment through HAL.