“We aren’t seeing any growth of our traditional business (furniture). We are struggling not to lose revenue every day. Last September we started a change by taking 10% from the home furniture space and transferring it to home decor and gifts for the home,” Sucu said.
The group operates a network of 32 stores and hypermarkets, with more than 110,000 square meters of display space, and nine plants.
Mobexpert closed its store in Sun Plaza mall in Bucharest last summer but invested EUR2 million in an 8,000 square meter store in Oradea (NW Romania). Its top performer in Bucharest is the store in Baneasa (north of the city) and the best store in the rest of the country is located in Iasi (NE Romania).
Dan Sucu says sales went up 12% in the first four months on the year-ago period and expects full-year growth to reach 10%. Mobexpert posted EUR114 million revenue in 2011 and last year’s growth was 1% or 2% in euros (or 6% in lei).
Sales of furniture on the local market will go down again in 2013, according to the estimates of the main companies in this business, as the first few months showed it.
“There’s no rebound of purchasing power. We are absolutely positive the higher revenue did not come from a better market but from new lines of business we had not sufficiently worked on before,” Dan Sucu said.
The domestic furniture market stands at about EUR700 million and the largest retailers are Mobexpert, IKEA, Elvila, kika and Lemet. Furniture production was slightly up last year according to the Romanian Furniture Manufacturers Association (APMR).
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)