International Coatings Scene
EUROPE
BY SEAN MILMO
EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENT
MILMOCW@RODPUB.COM
Adapting to a slow growth economy
Europe’s
decorative
paint
producers are
showing how
new ideas
can give extra
resilience and
opportunities
for growth to
DIY coatings
during an
economic
recession.
The European construction market is expected to make only a slow recovery in 2010 after being hit hard by the
effects of the recession.
As a result producers of decorative and
architectural coatings have had to adapt
their strategies to deal with the prospect of
at best only sluggish growth stemming
mainly from continued restraints on investment in both new residential and non-resi-dential buildings.
So far paint companies have done surprisingly well in a sector experiencing overall
declining demand. They have managed to bolster sales and profitability by a combination
of innovations and cost-cutting measures.
Much of the innovations have been
focused on encouraging DIY consumers to be
more creative, particularly in their use of
color. Also the scope of decorative and architectural paints has been broadened to cover
not only colors but also the texture of coatings, especially their tactile qualities.
The greater versatility of their decorative
products has enabled coatings companies to
withstand the worse effects of a European
construction sector whose output has fallen
sharply over the past year.
In the eurozone of 16 European Union
(EU) countries, including the major
economies of Germany, France, Italy and
Spain, construction output started dropping
by 4.5% in the final quarter of 2008 and was
still going down by almost 10% in the third
quarter of 2009, according to figures from
the European Central Bank (ECB).
In the UK new construction orders in the
year to October 2009 were 19% lower than
in the previous 12 months. The decrease was
mainly due to big drop in commercial construction.
In Eastern Europe, which had until
recently been enjoying a building boom, con-
struction output plummeted in the first 10
months of 2009 by close to a third in
Slovenia and between a fifth and a quarter
in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, accord-
ing to figures from the European
Commission, the EU executive.
