economy opticians
Specialist companies are disappearing – the growing dominance of Fielmann and Co.
Status: 04.07.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
The ten largest eyewear companies by sales opened 338 new stores last year
Quelle: pa/D. Kerlekin/Snowfield Photograph
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Two-thirds of Germans wear glasses, and opticians’ sales are increasing year after year. However, the large chain stores in particular benefit from this development – while small retailers can no longer find new recruits.
The big ones are getting bigger, the small ones are giving up: independent eyewear retailers, who often still hold the master’s degree in opticians’ trade, are fighting for economic survival – and chain stores are expanding. This trend in the eyewear trade continued last year.
According to data from the Central Association of Opticians (ZVA), the number of optician shops fell by 180 to 11,100 in 2022. In the past three years, a total of 450 eyewear shops have given up.
At the same time, the ten largest eyewear companies based on sales opened 338 new stores. Almost every fourth optician in Germany is run by companies from this top ten list, with names such as Fielmann, Apollo Optik, Pro Optik, Mister Spex or Eyes + More.
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The entire industry had a turnover of 6.7 billion euros in 2022, which corresponds to an increase of almost two percent compared to the previous year. The market is big: after all, 67 percent of Germans wear glasses.
Source: Infographic WORLD
In Belgium and Switzerland, this proportion is even slightly higher. In Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Great Britain, on the other hand, it is significantly lower.
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Even in times of online trading, the industry is still shaped by stationary specialist shops. According to ZVA data, around 91 percent of all glasses are bought locally. Multichannel trade, which is the mixed form of both sales channels, accounts for seven percent.
Source: Infographic WORLD
Pure online sales only reach two percent and have even halved compared to the previous year. However, the affected internet retailers and start-ups among the eyewear suppliers are skeptical about these values.
“I don’t know where the industry association gets the figures on the share of online trade from. In my estimation, they are much higher,” says Dirk Graber, CEO of Mister Spex.
Source: Infographic WORLD
In fact, the association represents the optician’s trade rather than the digital eyewear retailer. “Maybe the traditional optician will be happy to read that neither omnichannel sales nor online retail are supposedly significant businesses,” says Graber.
Omnichannel is another term for sales both in-store and online. With regard to the individual business areas, the Mister Spex boss gives the following assessment: almost half of contact lenses are sold via Internet orders, and the proportion of sunglasses is similarly high.
Source: Infographic WORLD
With single-vision glasses, it is more than ten percent. Started purely as an online retailer, the company now has around 70 branches of its own.
Compared to other European countries, Germans have an average number of optician shops. There are 1.4 eyewear shops for every 10,000 inhabitants. But as in many professions, there is a shortage of young people in this sector.
In a survey by the ZVA, 68 percent of the companies said that they could not fill vacancies. The Federal Employment Agency states the number of 1420 vacancies in opticians by the end of 2022 – with 487 opticians registered as unemployed.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.
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