While many exchange or return Christmas and Three Kings gifts these days, the toy industry takes stock for another year and closes an exercise that they call a “realignment.” After the previous campaign, marked by inflation and the cost of freight, the 2023 campaign has been slightly better, sources in the sector point out, but it has also been marked by this necessary rearrangement, they explain to this newspaper. Companies like Injusa assure that, “although the losses have not been that high”, the campaign has been “complicated” and that is why they place a good part of their hopes in 2024, so that it begins to be better.
Business sources explain that the sector has experienced a significant drop in demand, as the Spanish Association of Toy Manufacturers (AEFJ) already predicted in its forecasts before Christmas, when it assured that 2023 was being “a key year” in the management of toy companies.
In that analysis, the foreign market had been fundamental. The European markets are the main clients of the industry and until the third quarter they had recorded generalized decreases in consumption that were already seen in the exports of the months of July, August and September, leaving the accumulated as of September 2023 with a slight growth of 0.16% (458 million euros).
“If this trend continues in the last three months of the year, more than 50% of annual exports will end the year in negative, between -2 and -3%,” predicted the AEFJ, based in Ibi, Alicante. Now, its general director, José Antonio Pastor, explains that it is early to take stock of how the month of December has been, the determining factor for the industry as it accounts for 43% of its total turnover, and the last three weeks between the 25th and 30% of the total.
Pastor explains that there is a “perception” that the campaign was finally encouraged, after months of overcoming the drop in families’ purchasing power. The balance of the behavior of the Spanish consumer is key for the industry to close the year positively, since the October-December period represents a percentage of 60% of sales for the total year, being the country with the greatest seasonality in our European environment. almost 20 points more than Germany or 12 more than Italy.
The global figures will not be known until the end of the year, coinciding with the Nuremberg International Toy Fair, where a prominent representation of the Valencian industry will travel accompanied by the industry councillor, Nuria Montes. It will be the second international event for an eminently exporting sector that these days participates, although in a more discreet way, in the Hong Kong toys and games fair, presenting the new products for 2024.
