Spring has arrived for the DIY sector. Really?

The piece of music played at the conclusion of the first-ever official opening ceremony for the Hardware Fair/Practical World, held yesterday (Sunday) in the Europa function suite at this year’s event, seemed almost programmatic: the invited guests were sent off on their tour of the fair to the strains of a hit song from the twenties, “Veronika, spring is here”.
But is the DIY spring really on its way? Dr Michael Lucke, chairman of the special fair advisory committee, tended to emphasise Germany’s negative side in his welcoming speech. These included the bottleneck in the field of reform, over-powerful trade unions, and too-high production and site costs. However, he not only took to task the central government, but regarded many managers and entrepreneurs as somewhat disheartened/defeatist as well – lacking in ideas, and anything but models of morality, ref. Mannesmann and Commerzbank.
It is understandable that Dr Josef Fischer, secretary of state at the ministry of economics and labour in North Rhine Westfalia, saw a rather different picture. He emphasised the fact that Germany is still one of the world’s biggest exporting nations, a position that a really weak country could not possibly maintain.
The ensuing tour of the fair organised by the BHB, which took in the stands of HDM Holz Dammers GmbH, Gebr. Dolle GmbH, Ryobi Technologies GmbH and August Vormann GmbH & Co, showed that it was still too soon to identify any uniform fair trend. “Wait-and-see” is the best way of describing the prevailing mood, in terms of attitudes towards the fair itself and to the current situation in which the industry finds itself as well.