Expansive trading group

27 DIY store groups, almost 1 300 stores in 19 countries - wanting to portray a region as enormous as Latin America using a few aggregated  key figures will only begin to do justice to the questions we want to look into here: What significance does home improvement retail between Mexico and Tierra del Fuego have? How is the industry positioned within the economic fabric of these countries?
On the other hand, several economic key figures do indeed provide an indication of what possible answers to these questions could look like. But firstly, it should be said: some of the traditional key figures, which the statistics team of DIY International at the Dähne Verlag publishing house normally draw upon in their "regional reports", are difficult to be applied in this case. The data situ­ation and also questions of boundaries - which sales channel really can be categorised under retail? Which location counts as home centre, which as professionally-orientated specialist trade store? - appear to the statis­ticians in this case to be too incomplete to claim to completely depict the Latin American home improvement market. The key figures "inhabitants per DIY store" or "inhabitants per square metre of retail space" which are otherwise usually specified in the "regional reports" by DIY International would seriously have to be omitted here.
But of course, several statements can be made in order to gauge the market. The first thing which is striking is Chile's weight. With a GDP per capita of more than USD 24 000 (PPP, i. e. measured on purchasing power parity), the country is at the head of the continent when it comes to economic power - in relation to the number of inhabitants. Argentina shows a similarly high value with a GDP per capita of more than USD 22 000, however the economy of the country is under great stress caused by the enormous yearly average inflation of 54 per cent in 2019. This inflation rate is undoubtedly topped by a long way by the five-digit value reached in Venezuela.
Chile also plays a pioneering role for the home improvement industry in the entire region, because this is the country in South America from which the two by far most expansive and best-performing DIY retailers come. Easy in the trade company Cencosud and, above all, Sodimac in the Falabella group.
In this respect, Easy has more locations in its Eastern neighbouring country Argentina than in its Chilean home (at the end of 2020 this was 51 compared to 37). In contrast, the dominance of…