Concept instead of king-size

In the past couple of years the highest level of growth has been in the B2B business. Those DIY players that have the largest share in the B2B sector have grown more than the B2C players.
The trend to build king-size DIY stores has gone. The new concept stores that have been built lately include strong B2B departments. Typically, such departments include separate shares of B2B assortments and separate customer service staff with a higher level of know-how. In Finland it is very common for most of the DIY players to operate with both the B2C and B2B sectors.
K-rauta has approximately 40 per cent of the market share and is clearly the biggest operator in the market.

There is one pure e-commerce DIY player in Finland: the Bygghemma group. This company operates three different online shops: taloon.com, netrauta.com and talotarvike.com. It has been increasing its sales within the past four years and is a medium size player in the market. However its development has been clearly on a higher level than the total market development.
Also, all the "old" DIY players have been active with their digital channels. That does not only mean e-commerce, they are also developing digital services for end users in order to support them with their projects. The business done in e-commerce is still on quite a low level, but customers are studying their options on the Internet before visiting a store - this is a completely global trend.

Finnish consumers are showing a growing trend towards making their building and renovation projects with the help of professionals. One reason for this is the increasing limitation coming from legislation. The other reason is that customers don't want to use their most valuable resource - time! - on renovation. In the future, one of the elements of success in the DIY sector will be how well operators can offer customers full projects and how well they can support B2B sales. An increase of service sales in DIY can already be observed.
Latest tendencies and preferred product ranges
In the B2C business, interior decoration product groups (for example paints, ceramic tiles, flooring) has increased in importance and in the last five years also the yard and garden has been developing on the DIY market. The Finnish summer continues to be…