5th Global DIY Summit voted best event ever

At the end of the 5th Global DIY Summit, held last week in Berlin, the delegates gave the event an overwhelming 81.4% ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’ rating; with a further 15.2% rating the event as ‘good’. A record 1000 delegates from 55 countries attended the congress, which included over 320 of the top retailers from around the world.

Due to the highly multicultural audience attending the Summit this year, the voting tool threw up very interesting results. The audience was predominantly composed of men with 77% of the total number of delegates. This year over 30% of the audience were retailers, a huge increase compared to the congress held in Stockholm last year. Suppliers are still the largest share among the different type of attendees: approximately 57% of the delegates were manufacturers.

Regarding expectations, the delegates have for their business development for this year compared to last year, 21% of them think very optimistic as they estimate it will be better than 10%. Around 39% of the audience was more cautious as they only forecasted a growth between 0% and 4%. Approximately 22 % of the suppliers think they will grow more than 10% compared to last year, while 20% of the retailers forecast the same growth.

The industry still seems to be skeptical regarding the swift change from bricks & mortar into online retailing, as 22% of the total delegates think that online sales shares in DIY in five years will be less than 10%. Almost 30% of the audience predicted a range between 10% and 15%. Even more interesting is that 18% of the delegates forecast more than 25%.

The delegates using the voting tool “voted” this event as the best ever. The next Global DIY Summit will be held in Barcelona from 13 to 14 June 2018. Over 67% of the delegates already confirmed their participation in next year’s Summit. Good news for Ireland was that Dublin was voted the destination of choice for the 2019 Summit, so we look forward to welcoming the DIY world to our shores in two years time…

This year’s theme was ‘A New Era – A Glimpse into the Future of Home Improvement‘. The speakers gave outstanding presentations on digital platforms as new business models worldwide; the political and economic forecasts with the Trump Presidency and Brexit; how a company should start its own digital transformation; the promising future for the garden sector and a global overview of home improvement stores around the world. The general perception of the global economy was positive and most of the speakers forecast more innovation and growth within the next years.

On the first day, Dr. Michael Grampp (Deloitte) presented a Global Economic and Political Overview and highlighted the risks and advantages within the era of Trump Presidency and Brexit. The high expectations for the presentation of the new President of EDRA, Sergio Giroldi (CEO, OBI), were fulfilled with his impressive keynote “The New Modern: Leaving the Past to Live the Future”. The presentations from Biren van Herck (Pro-Alliance), Richard van Hooijdonk and his DIY Startup Arena were particular highlights of the first day, along with the excellent presentation on Digital Transformation by Peter Rosseel, Director Management Consulting Research and Visiting Professor at University of Leuven.

The second day also saw very interesting presentations on new global consumer trends including Kai Herzberger (Director EMEA for e-commerce facebook) and Alexander Zerdick (Director Retail Google). According to our audience, the best two speakers of the whole Summit presented during the Keynote Session: Ken Hughes and Steven van Belleghem. Both of them delighted the audience with their presentations on digitalisation and new marketing strategies to reach new audiences.

The second day also delivered good presentations on how garden is becoming a very promising industry by Sebastian Gundel (OBI), Christian May (Kärcher) and David Domoney. Like every year, facts and figures on new growth markets from around the globe were presented by international companies such as Mitre 10 (New Zealand), DCM Holdings (Japan) and Jumia (Nigeria)

This year’s farewell speech was held by Jim Inglis, the Global DIY-Lifetime Award recipient from 2015 in London. According to the audience, his speech was one of the highlights of the event.

In the final wrap-up both Chairmen of the Global DIY Summit agreed that this had been a most interesting, informative and successful event having had a very positive feedback from the participants.

Information on next year’s Summit will soon be available on http://diysummit.org/ 

Details of some of the presentations at this year’s Summit will be published from the July/August edition of The Hardware Journal.