Home is where the hurt is
The 22seven Insights spending dashboards offer investors and retailers a detailed, real-time view of the aggregated spending decisions of more than 50,000 actual consumers across South Africa.?
Insights tracks spending across seven major categories such as Food, Apparel, and Home. Every major category is further segmented into sub-categories, and a specific dashboard is available for each one. This month, we’ve updated and expanded the dashboards and we’ll continue to do so over the next few months.?
The dashboards provide a market overview that includes changes in market share for each retailer, as well as an estimate of growth in user spending. Users are segmented into six income brackets that allow for detailed tracking. In addition, the dashboards include five years of historic information and other metrics, such as average transaction value and median monthly spend per user.
Shop Talk is our monthly newsletter that provides commentary on major themes emerging from the dashboard categories. This month, we turn our attention to the Home category...
Spending trends from the Home category: General Merchandise, Furniture & Homeware, DIY & Garden
Growth in 22seven user spending slowed in March across all tracked categories. The causes of this are well-reported: higher interest rates, load-shedding, higher inflation… Evidently, these factors are taking their toll.
Spending by 22seven users on General Merchandise, the largest of the Home sub-categories,?has been in decline for 18 months. Media spending (mostly pay TV and streaming services) has weakened rapidly since the action-packed end of 2022. Clothing spending slowed abruptly in March.
Spending in the Groceries and Pharmacy categories has been more resilient, but growth here is also slowing.
The outlier category is Lotto & Sports Betting (albeit a much smaller category). Spending here continues to enjoy considerable growth, far ahead of other categories.
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Digging a level deeper, the following heatmap gives more detail about 22seven user spending in different income brackets in the major categories. In general, weakness within each income bracket has emerged from the discretionary categories: General Merchandise, Clothing, and Media. But those are not the only categories affected by consumer weakness; the graphic also reveals slowing growth trends in March in categories where spend was previously increasing.
Even in a slowing market, some companies will outperform. 22seven’s data gives retailers and stock pickers the ability to evaluate company-level performance within various categories. The remainder of this report reveals the winners and losers in the Home category. These findings are reserved for subscribers.
If you would like to learn more about 22seven’s research, please get in touch using the button below?so we can set up a short virtual introduction.
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