A plethora of formats

A very diverse mix of players is active in the Swedish DIY market: wholesalers, specialist shops, and chains retailing an extended range of goods around the classic home improvement product groups. The heterogeneity of the sector is augmented by foreign companies operating side by side with Swedish firms and because the market is serviced by chains, franchise organisations and cooperatives.
The following study, which adopts a broad interpretation of the term "home improvement retailing" and so takes account of this multiplicity of operators, is based on the statistics produced by Dähne Verlag over a number of years. The latest version of these lists nearly 1 300 stores in Sweden. This high figure is due among other things to the inclusion of four companies that are highly specialised and operate many smaller outlets.
The cooperative Bolist has the most stores, 168 to be precise, to which the 34 Jarnia outlets must also be added. This is because the affiliates of this cooperative opted in 2018 to join the larger Bolist organisation.
Ranked according to number of stores, the franchise chain Colorama comes next with 159 outlets. This is not a full-range DIY store, however, but a chain of 400 m² shops specialising - as the name suggests - in paint, wallpaper, floorings and tiles.
Another business focused exclusively on paint and painting accessories is Flügger with 132 stores at present. The explanation is simple: Flügger is first and foremost a paint manufacturer. The company is based in Denmark with three factories in Sweden and a wallpaper plant in Poland since 2009.
The fourth player with over 100 stores is XL-Bygg (currently 125 outlets), a cooperative of builders' merchants.
But who are the big-box DIY retailers in Sweden? None of them are Swedish. First of all, there is the German chain Bauhaus, which arrived in the country in 1997 and now has 19 stores there, five of which are in the capital Stockholm. Its reputation as a large-format specialist rings true even in this country to which it has expanded: the biggest Bauhaus store is around 18 000 m² in size, the average retail area of all Swedish Bauhaus stores is nearly 14 000 m², and the overall retail area is the second biggest among DIY operators in Sweden at more than 250 000 m².
Bauhaus knows its rival in big-box retailing all too well from its home country: the Swedish Hornbach stores, now totalling six, are slightly larger on average. However, Hornbach has now announced its intention of expanding in the…