Heritage Business Journal

Most would agree that the heritage industry is becoming globalized. Many companies now work on projects in areas of the world outside of where they are headquartered. A few companies, through acquisition and/or organic growth, are beginning to have a global footprint with offices on different continents. How is work distributed globally? Environmental Business Journal (Volume 24(11)) recently reported that the global market for environmental consulting and engineering services was $53 billion in 2010. While heritage services are an unknown part of that number, we would expect that the distribution of revenue is proportionately the same for heritage services as for the larger environmental category of which heritage services are a part. These data show that 47% of revenue was from the United States, 35% was from Western Europe, and only 18% was from the rest of the world. While emerging economies may be growing disproportionately faster than the “developed” world, and may present important market opportunities for heritage firms, the market for heritage services currently appears to be centered in the U.S. and Western Europe.