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Will “@home” continue to drive sales success in 2021?

IT posted an outstanding performance in the Black Friday season in 2020 as home-bound customers focused on urgently getting the products they needed to work or study at home – be that notebooks, media tablets, monitors or similar.

Small domestic appliances (SDA) also performed extremely well as eating, cleaning, hygiene, health and wellbeing rose in importance driven by the @home movement.In terms of specific devices, kitchen machines, food preparation in general, coffee machines and vacuum cleaners all saw strong sales.And there’s no end in sight here. Norbert Herzog explains:

As the home office is here to stay, and people look set to cook at home much more in the long-term, there are still plenty of opportunities for upgrades and replacements. Manufacturers and retailers should still be focusing on these @home categories for Black Friday 2021.

But there are some risks too. Once people start to focus more on out-of-home entertainment when vaccinations are completed, home entertainment will be less important.TVs will remain a key category for Black Friday, grabbing shoppers’ attention with attractive prices, but they are not likely to be a sales growth driver this year.In Europe, TVs are set to decline in the second half of 2021, because the 2020 double-digit growth seen in many markets created a saturation point. Looking at performance in 2021 to date, the Telecom sector started to stage a comeback in January/February.This is likely to persist, especially for the second half of the year, with trends such as 5G driving market dynamics.

We expect a smartphone recovery this year. As this category was lower on the priority list in 2020, demand will pick up again as the importance of “out of home and mobile” returns.