A special year

For the companies in the German DIY store trade, financial year 2019 marked a special year. At least that's how the German DIY retail association BHB sees it: although the weather conditions with long rain spells as well as temperature records over the 40 degree mark proved more than challenging, specialist DIY and garden stores in Germany were able to record their best sales results for more than ten years.
With total gross sales of EUR 19.46 bn, the industry achieved a clear rise in sales of 3.6 per cent last year. Even when adjusted to retail space, the industry registered a more than solid growth of +3.8 per cent. With sales of EUR 19.5 bn, the DIY store industry in 2019 thus lay at around EUR 1.1 bn above the value of 2010. This data is based on figures by the market research company GfK.
The association is clearly pleased. DIY is "trendy again," said managing director Peter Wüst when presenting the figures. And Franz-Peter Tepaß, head of Obi Deutschland and speaker of the BHB executive board said: "The specialist DIY and garden stores in Germany have learned from the extreme weather of 2018 with long hot spells and the resulting goods bottlenecks and have implemented the correct measures in ordering activity and in the stocking of relevant assortments and have expanded these expediently."
However if truth be told, this significant growth in Germany is primarily thanks to an above-average increase in sales by two market players: market leader Obi grew in Germany by 6.5 per cent, Hornbach, the number five in sales rankings, by 5.3 per cent.
These figures originate from the trade journal diy which they will publish in their Statistik Baumarkt + Garten D-A-CH 2020 at the end of May 2020 (orders being taken at www.daehne.de/statistik). Consequently, the top 10 of the DIY trade in Germany grew by 4.4 per cent in 2019. Bauhaus, the number two, lies slightly above this (4.5 per cent), Toom (fouth place) achieved 2.5 per cent, Hagebau (with the sales channels Hagebaumarkt and Werkmarkt) rose by only just under one per cent.
According to the GfK-Total-Store-Report, when looking at the assortment developments in the overall year, the German DIY stores achieved the highest amount of sales in 2019 with the assortments construction chemicals/construction materials (around EUR 2.02 bn) as well as sanitary/heating (EUR 1.80 bn). For the second time, the garden equipment assortment range maintained third place in the sales ranking (EUR 1.39 bn) before the tools segment…