The Canadian market for office furniture (at retail prices) in 2005 totaled $6,370 million, up 10.5% over 2004. This was the 14th year in a row with positive growth. On an historic perspective, the office furniture market is ahead by 130% between 1995 and 2005. Even if expressed in constant dollar terms the advance of 90% is still quite respectable.
The key contributors to office employment are finance, professional and technical services, management services, and government. We expect that office furniture intensive employment will continue to grow faster than non-office intensive employment. In fact, we foresee overall gain in office employment of 14% or approximately 486,000 persons between 2005 and 2015. In particular, professional and technical services as well as management services will grow at an above-average pace.
Due to the above mentioned employment trends, we believe that growth of the office furniture market this year ? as well as in all years within our prediction period (2005 ? 2015) ? will remain positive ? both in value and unit terms, hovering around the 2 to 8% range. For this year, we anticipate a market value of C$ 6,883 million (expressed at retail prices), up from C$ 6,370 million last year. If our predictions are correct, the market value would reach C$ 10,461 million mark in 2015.
The office furniture market is about evenly divided among seats (both of the metal and non-metal variety), all other metal office furniture, and all other non-metal office furniture. The impact new technologies in the office environment caused some shifts in the market composition of office furniture during the past ten years along the following lines:
? seats increased their share from 31% to 35%. The advance applies to both metal and non-metal seats, as well as to swivel and other seats.
? non-metal office furniture gained market share at the expense of metal office furniture.
? there is a shift away from desks towards other forms of office employee accommodation, especially toward systems combining work-tops and storage
waiting area furniture,
hotel lounge furniture
