March the 23rd, 2021 - Croatian furniture stores have seen an increase in revenue, but there are a third less of them currently in operation as their numbers have been going down since long before the pandemic struck.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Brnic writes, although the impression is that the number of Croatian furniture stores is constantly growing, Fina's data shows the total opposite. In the last ten years, the number of Croatian furniture stores fell by 37 percent (from 349 back in 2009 to 219 in 2019), and the number of employees in this sector decreased by 16 percent (from 3177 to 2672).

At the same time, net salaries for those working in this industry increased by an impressive 77 percent (from 3,917 kuna to 6,925 kuna), and total revenues in those ten years rose by more than 1 billion kuna or 45.5 percent, from a total of 2.33 to 3.39 billion kuna. There are three main players in the market when it comes to Croatian furniture store - Lesnina rather unsurprisingly holds the leading position, followed by the equally popular Ikea and Jysk.

These three furniture retailers operating within Croatia's borders also generate 86 percent of all revenues - Lesnina almost 1.1 billion kuna, Ikea 851 million kuna, and Jysk 562 million kuna in total.

More than 100 million in revenue is generated by Intermod from Zadar and Mima Furniture from Pula, and in the top ten in this regard are also ART Interijeri - kitchens 2000 from Split, ART Interijer Zagreb, Vokel from Imotski, Nas dom namjestaj (Our home furniture) from Vinkovci and Themelia from Zagreb. Lesnina is also the leader in terms of profit (66 million kuna back in 2019), while Jysk had a higher profit than the third on this list, being Ikea.

The results of operations in the conditions of the ongoing coronavirus crisis are yet to be announced, but in the last decade, the most difficult year of all for these retailers was 2014, which was concluded with a net loss of 111 million kuna.

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