Thalia sales up 2% despite high street footfall decline

German bookstore chain Thalia reported preliminary figures in line with expectation for fiscal 2017. In a difficult retail environment with fewer customers frequenting the high street, Germany’s largest book chain saw sales grow 2% in the 12 months to end-September. This was thanks to online growth in the upper single-digit range, whereas brick-and-mortar stores were down 2% in line with the market average.

While business was modestly up in the German core market as well as in Austria, the joint venture Orell Füssli Thalia delivered another set of disappointing figures in Switzerland for the first six months of 2017. Sales of the 32 bookshops jointly run by Thalia and Swiss bookseller Orell Füssli, were down 6.2%, while like-for-like the decline was 3%.

Apart from the Swiss operation, Thalia seems back on track with a newfound optimism 15 months after a German consortium of trade insiders and the management took over the chain from US private equity company Advent for an estimated €100m. According to managing partner Michael Busch, the company is investing a total of €30m in its e-commerce activities as well as the stores in 2016 and 2017.

Expanding e-commerce and bringing offline and online closer together is high on the company’s agenda. Thalia has recently introduced its own Thalia-App that allows customers to search for titles in the shops and order them in their local branch. A few days ago the company entered into a partnership with the digital start-up Papego. After booksellers have successfully been testing tablets to help with customer enquiries in eleven shops, the plan is to roll out the electric device throughout the chain in 2018.