Office Furniture Manufacturers in Great Britain are facing more Challenges

After several years of healthy growth during the second half of the 1990s, the office furniture industry in Great Britain has entered a phase of stagnation or only modest growth. Most of the observed growth goes on account of higher prices. Sales in real-terms - that is after the elimination of the impact of inflation - are now approximately thirty percent lower than at the beginning of this century. We anticipate that growth this year and again next year will remain lacklustre and hover around the two percent range. If our predictions are correct, the market value will exceed for the first time the ?700 million mark this year.

Sales of filing cabinets and other office storage furniture fared particularly poorly. This is not surprising and a reflection of the continuing transition from paper-based offices to paperless offices. On the other hand, workstations and other system furniture, as well as office chairs have been performing better. In fact the market share of workstations and similar furniture is now close to one-half, while it was only in the forty percent range during the late 1990s.

An interesting trend is that wooden office furniture is gaining in popularity, even though such products are generally more expensive than metal or plastic furniture. A possible explanation for this phenomenon could be the increasing use of technology in modern offices. Wooden furniture offers a good counterbalance to an otherwise sterile environment by providing more warmth to the office.

Foreign competition remains a formidable and growing challenge for UK office furniture manufacturers. The so called import penetration ? that is the percentage of foreign produced office furniture ? approaches one-third. We predict that it will exceed 50% by 2010. During the 90s the ratio was less than one-quarter. Most imported products still have their origin in other European countries, but imports from China and other Asian countries (such as Vietnam) show by far the fastest growth rate.

Stefan Wille
AKTRIN Furniture Information Center
Web: Office Furniture in Great Britain