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KPMG: UK retail sector trends 2020 & forecast 2021
Last week, Paul Martin, Head of UK Retail at KPMG kindly joined myself for a video interview to talk about the trends of the retail sector in 2020, what’s to come in 2021 and where we should be focusing our attention/efforts in order to be successful.
Trends of 2020:
It’s a fluid situation. We experienced the first instances from a health perspective from January, and of course, from a global perspective, things are changing country by country since.
- Retail in the UK is a £395bn industry. The store shutdown during March and April had a large negative impact on retailers.
- In April/May, we expected a 5-6% overall annual decline in annual sales.
- After a more buoyant Summer (June, July, and August) even though we still expect a decline, the performance was much better than expected, and we now believe the annual outlook is more likely to be 1% drop.
- Heading into the final golden quarter, this is so important for performance. Especially with furlough unwinding, we have lived in a protected bubble for a certain amount of time, and we’ll expect to see a negative financial impact from the end of October.
- Retail can’t just be looked at in its entirety.
- If you look at the food category or home, they have faired very well. 42% of all food pre-covid was consumed out of home, large parts of that economy have come to a significant standstill. More consumers are now eating at home, so the grocery sector in some cases have seen double-digit increases.
- Furniture, Home-wear, DIY (specifically over the summer) have also seen positive uplift.
- On the flip side, some categories have experienced a more challenging environment –
October 6th, 2020
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