The Rebirth of German Mail-Order?
Jun 17th, 2009 by admin
The bankruptcy of Quelle is only the last evidence: The German mail order industry is in an utterly desolate state. Conceptually still stuck in the 70s, it has in the last 15 years completely disassociated itself with the international reality and has in no way been able to latch on to future new markets.
A good example are the business models for the consumer electronics market (online/mobile/tv), which is unmistakably the fastest growing market segment. According to bvh figures, in 2008 this segment had reached a market volume of 7.8 billion euro. This makes it almost 28% of the entire mail order market (according to our estimates, this value will double by 2017).
In this very future relevant segment, the Primondo Group (via HSE24 and currently defunct MyBy) made an appearance with a market share of 5%, the Otto Group (via MyToys and Jungstil) with 1%, and Neckermann isnt even on the map.
Instead, besides the international players (Amazon, Ebay, QVC), the market here is dominated by independant, stock exchange listed merchants such as Delticom, Getmobile or Zooplus, as well as electronics suppliers like Redcoon or Notebooksbilliger, a cornucopia of small and garage operations as well as startups such as Brands4Friends, Preisbock & Co.
More bitter still is when you consider only the future relevant business models and filter out all the old style catalog type concepts that, even in an online world, will increasingly experience harder times.
The dominance and the inherited market weight of Otto, Quelle and Neckermann has lead to the result that very few new business models were able to find fertile soil. And so such new ideas are finding their way to Germany via the USA or now increasingly from France.
Hope remains that the long overdue restructuring moves quickly and that new business models start moving to the foreground which can honestly be ranked in the same league as Amazon, QVC or Vente-Privee.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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