Gardening to be main driver of DIY Sector growth

DIY & gardening retailers are set to grow sales over the next four years with green-fingered customers driving spending, according to a new study.

A report by Verdict Research has shown that the DIY & gardening sector will be worth £12.9 billion by 2014, an increase of 2.1 per cent from last year.

Most of this increase will come from gardening products however, with sales up 5.6 per cent, whilst sales of DIY items will increase just 0.4 per cent over the same period.

Malcolm Pinkerton, Senior Analyst at Verdict, said: “Gardening continues to capture the imagination of consumers; at the same time consumers have lost interest in DIY, and are less willing to invest in their homes.

“Attention is increasingly being shifted from inside our homes to outside. This has been fuelled by the aging population as well as the rise in the popularity of ‘grow your own’.”

Verdict’s research shows DIY specialists still holding over half of the overall market at present, with B&Q the largest DIY retailer in the UK with a market share of 25.9 per cent.

UK & Ireland was the worst region for B&Q owner Kingfisher in its third quarter, and it will hope that its pre-Christmas discount sales period will have helped boost sales ahead of Q4 results published later this week.

In Q3 domestic trading for B&Q and Wickes fell 3.7 per cent year-on-year, reflecting increasingly cautious consumer’s sentiment and people reluctant to spend on non-essentials.

Pinkerton believes that there is grow potential in the sector however and added: “It would be a mistake to think that a higher rate of VAT and a slow housing market means that sales of DIY items are inevitably going to be slow and there is nothing to be done.

“Pockets of growth are available to be exploited; catering for the demands of increasingly environmentally conscious consumer looking to reduce energy bills will provide huge growth in eco products over the next few years. Fully catering for this demand could prove lucrative.”

Source : Retail Gazette