Baumit: Navigating the Construction Sector Slowdown in Austria - Sales, Challenges, and Potential

2024-02-18 06:25:00

The weak construction sector slowed Baumit down last year. The Lower Austrian building materials retailer’s sales fell by 3.6 percent to 320 million euros. The number of employees remained almost constant at 710, and investments increased slightly to 23 million euros. Baumit announced these figures at a press conference this week.

A “very challenging year” is expected for this year. A sharply declining market is met with rising costs. The subsidies for thermal renovation are higher than ever before – but there is a lot of ignorance here. And little is happening, thermal renovation has been stagnating since 2015. “In order to make the building sector climate-proof and therefore future-proof by 2040, an annual renovation rate of around three percent is necessary,” said Baumit managing director Georg Bursik.

Great potential in Austria

In any case, the potential is great. Bursik calculated that 33 percent of the population owns a house that was built before 1995. Four out of ten homeowners are older than 60 years. “Across Austria, more than half of the potential renovation households have less than 15,000 euros in savings,” Bursik refers to his own surveys.

In any case, there is strong support. The federal funding level for the thermal renovation of buildings was tripled at the beginning of the year from 14,000 to a maximum of 42,000 euros. Specifically, this applies to private single-family, two-family and terraced houses. But new subsidies were also added to multi-story residential buildings, and previous subsidies were also tripled, Baumit points out. Bursik would like politicians to reform lending guidelines, a temporary VAT exemption for thermal renovation and faster procedures.

The Baumit Group has 4,900 employees in 25 countries. Sales recently amounted to 1.73 billion euros.

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