Mr. DIY ends 2023 with 879 new stores

Mr. DIY, a home improvement retailer that started in Malaysia and expanded across Europe and Asia, increased its store count by 33 per cent last year, its executive said. Leo Gan, Mr. DIY Malaysia chief operating officer, disclosed that the company added 879 outlets to its global store network last year to end it with 3 481 branches. “Despite challenges in 2023, we've overcome them gracefully,” he said in a post on Linkedin. Gan did not give a breakdown for the number of stores that were added in each market that Mr. DIY currently operates in, but it appears that growth has been uneven.

Information on the group’s website indicate that in Vietnam, where the group only started operations in August 2023, Mr. DIY met its target of opening ten stores. Data from the website also indicate that including outlets that were launched since the start of 2024, Mr. DIY now has 1 150 eponymous outlets in Malaysia (from 988 in end-January 2023); 753 (from 576) in Thailand, including a flagship store; 700 (from 494) in Indonesia; 495 (from 334) in the Philippines; 173 (from 105) in India; 78 (from 39) in Turkey; 24 (from 16) in Spain; and five (from four) in Cambodia.

In two markets, no new stores were added – in Singapore, Mr. DIY still has twelve outlets and in Brunei, its store count stayed at nine.

It was also unclear whether the company met its target, set in July 2023, to open in two new markets, as there has been official announcement on whether it managed to enter a twelfth territory after successfully penetrating Vietnam.

There were indications that the twelfth market could be either Bangladesh or Greece. DIY International reported last October that while company officials were trumpeting Poland as a potential market, Mr. DIY was quietly laying the groundwork to enter the South Asian country of 169.4 million people, with social networks being set up and key personnel going on a hiring spree.

A statement issued by the Mr. DIY Group last December listed Bangladesh as one of the markets of the home improvement retailer, and recently the website for Mr. DIY Bangladesh went live, indicating that operations in the country have either started or are about to start. However, the website has not yet been linked to the Mr. DIY Group’s landing page, which lists all the markets that the Malaysian enterprise operates in, as of press time. It also contains no information on store openings in the country.

However, in Greece, where the company has a two-year-old subsidiary, reports…