Demand for electronic appliances declining in Poland

2010-09-04

In the first half of 2010, the sales of white goods went down by 18% year on year in Poland, according to GfK Temax data. By the way of example, in Q1 and Q2 2009, the value of the electronic equipment segment, including IT and office appliances, totalled PLN 6.2bn (€1.5bn) and PLN 5.7bn (€1.4bn), respectively, while in the analogous periods of 2010 the figures were PLN 5.4bn (€1.3bn) and PLN 5bn (€1.2bn), respectively. By the way of comparison, in Western Europe the demand for white goods grew by between 4-6% in H1 2010, depending on the country. In the segment of small electronic appliances, the value of the market went down by 8.5% year on year in Poland, while in such countries as Russia and Ukraine, the segment grew by 20.2% and 30%, respectively.
The retailers underline that at present there are no categories of the products that could boost the sales, as it used to be in the previous years in the case of LCD TV sets, MP3 players or laptops. Jacek Hudowicz, the chairman of Media Saturn Holding, the owner of the Media Markt and Saturn chains, quoted by Rzeczpospolita, claims that generating the revenues in 2010 at the same level as in 2009 is rather impossible.