Monthly survey on retail trade 2020Apr

Published on 19 May 2020

Turnover in retail trade kept dropping in April
Warnings
As Covid-19 induced extraordinary conditions for retailers, key figures are not published in their usual form this month. In order to capture the full impact of the lockdown, figures are compared to April 2019 ("year-on-year").
The magnitude of the turnover drop in April cannot be extrapolated to overall consumption since retail trade is only a fraction of total households' consumption expenditures. They also include less crisis-dependent items, such as health, education, rents.
In April, with a lockdown lasting the whole month, turnover in retail trade was down by 40 % year-on-year (adjusted for seasonal and working-day variations). In March, the decrease was of 22.4%. The decline was due to an important 67.5 % fall in sales of industrial products. Food sales posted a moderate growth of 0.6 %.

In terms of distribution channel, small retailer sales faced a sizeable downturn of 55 %, whereas sales at large general retailers decreased less, by 2 %. Supermarkets posted a growth of 12 %, while hypermarkets sales fell by 7 % and department stores faced a huge drop of 71 %. E-commerce experienced a sustained growth of 18 % at the end of March.
Total industrial goods and food sales: M/M-1 change
April 2020 compared to April 2019 ; seasonally and working-day adjusted volume terms
Notes :
- Sectors are classified according to the relative weight of the products included in the total aggregate of retail trade (see methodology)
- The aggregated and by sub-sector series are seasonally adjusted on an individual basis: the seasonally adjusted series do not represent the sum of the seasonally adjusted components.
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