Office furniture: inflationary pressure to push list prices
Bottlenecks in the supply of materials for office furniture affected: fittings, aluminum profiles, plastics, and wood-based materials.
According to the office furniture manufacturers interviewed by CSIL, material costs increased severely in 2021 and 2022. In the last months also energy prices boomed, and this situation is expected to persist until the first half of 2023, at least.
Persistently, high energy prices will continue to have inflationary implications, particularly through second-round effects such as higher transport and electricity costs for businesses. Inflationary pressures stemming from commodity prices will be further exacerbated in countries that have had sizeable currency depreciations against the US dollar.
In response to the further increase in costs, office furniture companies have significantly increased their list prices between 2021-2022 and they already announced renewed price increases for 2023. Most companies especially in Europe and in the United States explained that they were forced to make extraordinary list prices growth besides the standard ones.
Many of them declared that extra price increases started at the end of the year 2021 (typically Oct-Dec 2021). The expectations for the whole price growth of 2023 are very uncertain. However, all the companies already decided on a further lift for the first semester of the next year.
As a result, the range of growth operated in 2022 and already decided for the next months of 2023 is in a total range of 18%-22% on average for Europe and North America. It easily surpasses 25% if we also include the modification already operated at the end of 2021.
On the other hand, list price variations are less marked in the Asia Pacific.
CSIL’s office furniture market studies deal with facts and figures of the global office furniture industry. CSIL is currently working on the new edition of an in-depth analysis of European office furniture sector in the report ‘The European market for office furniture’. Find more details at https://www.worldfurnitureonline.com/report/the-european-market-for-office-furniture/
