Lorand Szarvadi, the chief executive of electronics and home appliances retail network Domo, taken over by investment fund Equest Investment Balkans (EIB) last year, has revised 2008 turnover estimates downwards, as a result of the slower performance in the first half.
"The budget needs to be revised to 240-250 million euros for this year. After a 58% increase in 2007 we budgeted 40% for 2008, but we will only get 30%", Szarvadi stated.
The retailer had initially estimated a 270 million-euro turnover for this year after having posted more than 200 million euros in the previous financial year, which includes the results of the stores in Bulgaria.
Domo's CEO said that the monthly increase in sales reached 28-30% compared with the same time last year and was largely because of the new stores in the network. The increase in sales witnessed by the stores already operational in the first half of last year was below 10%.
"2008 did not have a great start and we are 5% below our budget, which is not much because we built our forecasts on the very high growth of last year," Szarvadi said.
The market trend, whose growth pace was slower than last year was explained by the natural regulation of demand.
The electronics, home appliances and IT&C products market climbed to 1.27 billion euros in 2007, according to Domo data, from some 900 million euros in 2006.
Judging from the current trend of the market, the sales of electronics, home appliances and IT&C products in 2008 will reach 1.4 billion euros.
"After this regulation, there will be two years of higher sales and we estimate an annual growth of 20%. Until then, let's see what August and the fourth quarter will bring," Szarvadi added.
He stated he expected Romanians working abroad to do the same as they did in the past holidays, when they spent a lot of money on electronics, home appliances and IT products.
To be able to absorb the growth of the market, Szarvadi said the Technomarket Domo group would continue to develop its networks so that three more Technomarket stores would be opened by the end of the year, with investments starting from 150 euros/square metre.
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