EU – At the beginning of the year the European promotional products umbrella association, EPPA, published the results of its “Annual EPPA Survey of Business Structure”. For this purpose the members of seven of the eleven national associations that are members of EPPA were interviewed by the Cologne Institute for Research in Retailing:

BWL (Germany), Promota (UK), PPP (the Netherlands), 2FPCO (France), BAPP (Belgium), VÖW (Austria) as well as Assoprom (Italy). The eleven member associations of EPPA represent around 10,000 promotional products suppliers and distributors.

One of the results of the survey is that for the majority of companies the fiscal year 2009 turned out better than expected. Above all the promotional products players in Austria and the UK view their situation positively: almost 54% of the Austrian and almost 38% of the British companies assess their fiscal year as good, 38.5% and 52.5% respectively as satisfactory. Over half of the companies interviewed in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands also consider the year 2009 to be satisfactory, however in Italy almost 62% of the promotional products players consider their situation to be explicitly “poor”.

Furthermore, the expectations for 2010 are positive in most of the seven markets under survey too: Particularly in Italy and the UK over half of the interviewees are expecting economic growth, in France a good 45%, in Austria and Germany 38.5% and 37.5% respectively. Only a very small percentage of the companies surveyed in the individual countries are assuming that 2010 will be worse than 2009: The highest shares here were recorded in Belgium and Italy (almost 17% and good 15% respectively), and the lowest shares were registered in the UK and Austria (2.5% and 5.5% respectively).

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