Golden quarter boost for flooring business, but…
October 21, 2024
The “golden quarter” of flooring has begun according to ONS figures released on Friday which show a 24% uplift in sales in September, but the data may be distorted say analysts.
The Office for National Statistics recorded sales up 23.5% to £309.2m from £250.2m compared to August and that figure is 13% up on this time last year.
However, some doubt has been cast over recent ONS reports for the sector which also reported year-on-year growth of 12.7% in August.
According to analysts at The Furnishing Report, the figures are “simply not credible” and they suspect a distortion due to the impact of the Carpetright stores closure.
ONS furniture and flooring retail data is based on a survey is based on a poll of about 900 large and 4,100 small-to-medium-sized retailers using random sampling.
The suspicion is that many of the surveyed flooring retailers are gaining sales from ex-Carpetright customers but that the overall value of UK sales is not rising nearly so fast. So this is still very good news for independent retailers but less impressive for manufacturers and wholesalers for whom the uplift may be much more modest.
We reported last week that market leader Victoria plc said: "The flooring sector is experiencing the most severe and longest decline in demand in the last 30 years.”
“There are signs that the market is improving but for now, it is very much a case of caveat emptor when interpreting the data,” says The Furnishing Report. “Counterintuitively, the absence of Carpetright from the data may be artificially boosting the figures.”
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