Wildly varying starts for DIY markets

The different countries of Europe started the year 2012 in greatly varying ways. 25 percentage points separate the growth rates of the individual countries. Heading the table are the markets of countries with such different levels of development as Norway and Russia: from January to April the DIY retail sector here recorded like-for-like sales 13 per cent up on the same period last year. These figures were named at the Home Improvement Forum in Disneyland near Paris by Régis Degelcke, vice president of Groupe Adeo and director of EDRA, the European DIY retailers’ association. There were also double-digit rates of growth in Lithuania (twelve per cent) and Estonia (ten per cent). Ireland was bottom of the table with a decline of twelve per cent. Big markets such as those of Britain and the Netherlands were also clearly in the negative range.Degelcke interprets these statistics as a trend. They are not as accurate as might be desired, since some DIY retailers have failed to report any figures. He mentioned the poor weather in April as the main reason for what are in certain cases severe setbacks.The full list of all the 23 countries covered, complete with their rates of change in the first four months of 2012, can be found at DIYglobal plus (see below: Further articles on this topic).