Michael J. Knell — Furniture Today,
\nOAKVILLE, Ontario \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Canadian consumer spending on furniture will moderate this year, slowing its growth in response to declining consumer confidence, weaker income growth and a retrenching housing market, according to the Aktrin Furniture Information Centre, a private industry think tank here.<\/p>\n
Even though the Canadian economy is outperforming that of the United States, Aktrin President Stefan Wille believes its annual growth rate will decline from the 2.8% seen in 2012 and 2013 to 2.4% this year. Personal income growth also will slow, he said.
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\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Growth of real disposable income in 2013 was 4.8%,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wille said in the latest edition of Furniture Economics. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Growth will be much slower this year and is estimated to be only 2.9% and this in spite of the promised income tax cuts by the new government.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
While the Canadian residential housing market continued growing in 2013, Wille said that on a value basis housing starts only advanced 2.4% after expanding at rates of 3.2% in 2012 and 7.8% in 2004.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153However, the market is now saturated now and demand is waning,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We predict a negative growth rate of 1.7% this year. If mortgage rates continue to climb, it may even fall further. In unit terms, this represents a drop from 228,000 (housing starts) in 2013 to 205,000 this year.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Consumer spending on all goods and services is likely to contract from the 4% growth rates in each of the past two years. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Due to the slowing economy, we anticipate a growth rate of 3.1% in 2014 and less than 3% in 2015,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wille said.<\/p>\n
Expenditures for durable consumer goods \u00e2\u20ac\u201d including furniture and other big ticket home goods \u00e2\u20ac\u201d grew at a healthy rate of 6.8%, on top of 5.5% growth in 2012. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153However, as consumer confidence is declining, we expect durable consumer good sales to advance by only 4.3% this year and possibly still lower next year,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wille said.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Measured at retail prices, Wille said the Canadian furniture market grew 8.9% in 2013, continuing a growth trend that started during the third quarter of 2002.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153For 2014, we predict a noticeable slowdown to a rate slightly below 3%,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The size of the Canadian furniture market in 2013 stood at C$11 billion (evaluated at retail prices and including sales taxes that average 14% nationally) and if our growth predictions are correct, the market valuation will reach approximately C$11.4 billion this year.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michael J. Knell — Furniture Today, OAKVILLE, Ontario \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Canadian consumer spending on furniture will moderate this year, slowing its growth in response to declining consumer confidence, weaker income growth and a retrenching housing market, according to the Aktrin Furniture Information Centre, a private industry think tank here. Even though the Canadian economy is outperforming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}