Newsletter
Shop
Login
Menü
Subscribe now
Deep insights, facts & figures: Premium information for the home improvement industry.
- Retailers and suppliers: exclusive insights
- Market analyses and country reports
- Trends in the DIY and garden market
- Latest news and archive
TRIAL OFFER
Online subscription
Continue reading now
Already a subscriber?
Obi boss Sergio Giroldi has publicly implied several times that his company too will realign in the face of the new main competitors he has recognised for the stationary DIY trade in Europe, in which Amazon, Alibaba and co. are meant. And that is what he did in May 2017: according to the sounds coming from Wermelskirchen, from now on Obi is following a new business strategy with the aim of restructuring "the company into the leading customer-orientated cross-channel DIY store operator". In order to develop and test the new offer, a new unit has been created under the name of "Obi next", which has been located in Cologne. Karl-Erivan Haupt, head of the Obi parent company Tengelmann up until his disappearance in the Alps, talked himself of "a future lab" in December 2017. Up to 160 new employees are said to be tinkering on new sales and offer models for Obi in Köln-Müllheim.
"Brands - and I'm talking of supplier brands - will play an increasingly important role in future," explained Giroldi when talking of his plans in an interview with the trade journal diy in February this year. "In ten years at the latest, we will have only three to four market participants - and that in Europe as a whole." And further: "Competition, also with the major Internet players, leads to a radical democratisation of the trade as a whole."
The first national market to implement and test the new business model was Austria. The Austrian market is in many respects an image of its big German brother - this also applies to DIY stores. Here the large is to mirror the small, so to speak. As soon as the elements developed there have proven to be successful, they are to be introduced into the whole of the company.
Dr Sebastian Gundel, at Obi since 2012, and hitherto managing director of Customer Offer and Marketing in the company, has become the director of the "Obi next" unit in Cologne, as well as the entire Austrian business of the DIY store operator. He was previously active as project manager at OC&C Strategy Consultants. Paolo Alemagna, member of the executive board at Obi since 2005, left the company as part of this restructuring, apparently not entirely voluntarily.
"Brands - and I'm talking of supplier brands - will play an increasingly important role in future," explained Giroldi when talking of his plans in an interview with the trade journal diy in February this year. "In ten years at the latest, we will have only three to four market participants - and that in Europe as a whole." And further: "Competition, also with the major Internet players, leads to a radical democratisation of the trade as a whole."
The first national market to implement and test the new business model was Austria. The Austrian market is in many respects an image of its big German brother - this also applies to DIY stores. Here the large is to mirror the small, so to speak. As soon as the elements developed there have proven to be successful, they are to be introduced into the whole of the company.
Dr Sebastian Gundel, at Obi since 2012, and hitherto managing director of Customer Offer and Marketing in the company, has become the director of the "Obi next" unit in Cologne, as well as the entire Austrian business of the DIY store operator. He was previously active as project manager at OC&C Strategy Consultants. Paolo Alemagna, member of the executive board at Obi since 2005, left the company as part of this restructuring, apparently not entirely voluntarily.
After a little more than a year, the first theoretical considerations are now also…
Newsletter