What are the top industries to start a business in?

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JUL

What are the top industries to start a business in?

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources

The world is changing fast, and new industries emerge as old ones disappear and some go around and around. One of Victorian England’s growth industry was mica, used to make the transparent doors in stoves and fires at that period. After a long decline the mica industry has been resurgent since the plastics industry discovered that ground mica was a lightweight insulator that could suppress sound and vibration and improve the strength of plastic car components.

So what industries are the best to launch a new business today?

• Go green – environmental consulting is expected to grow at 9% a year for at least the next five years, and it’s going to expand into every area of life, from governmental contracts through to individual household assessments and support.
• Be a Babel fish – while Douglas Adams may have coined the creature in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, translation and interpretation are amongst the world’s biggest service industries today with a market growth of nearly 20% last year. It’s an industry fuelled by peace time commerce (think India and China) and wartime negotiations (think Afghanistan and Iraq) and has applications everywhere from serving as an interpreter in a GPs surgery to providing simultaneous translation at War Crimes Tribunals and mobile on demand translation is becoming a very big business indeed.
• Apps mean Opps – For real entry level success, being in on the mobile apps market as a programmer, developer or designer requires no more than skills and a little bit of luck. Allied to this is the indie market for niche computer games: those designed for specialist audiences that won’t sell to the mass market.
• Juicy, smoothie, fizzy, hot – Tea is a growth industry with the explosion in recent years from the teabag market into green and white teas, herbal teas, health teas, detox systems, and other drinks with large potential markets to tap, such as healthy juices and vitamin-enhanced waters.
• Hobby habits – it might be the recession causing nostalgia, or just because people are spending less on complex technological hobbies and more on classic pastimes, but the toy and game industry – excluding computer games – is undergoing a minor surge. It’s a good gamble anyway, because the next inventor who comes up with the equivalent of the Rubik’s Cube or Heelies will soon be a multi-millionaire.
• Intellect building – coaching for kids, mentoring adults and training for teens – tutoring, especially in languages like Russian, Chinese etc is a big growth area at present, as parents hothouse their children and adult learners seek to retrain for fast moving industries.