A 10% drop in toy sales for the holidays is anticipated

Despite the recovery in consumption that has been recorded in recent months in the Argentine economy, toy stores have been left out of the phenomenon. In this sense, employers’ expectations for the end of the season are, at best, “moderate”. Matías Furió, president of the Argentine Chamber of the Toy Industry, pointed out that the sector is coming off one of the worst Children’s Day in history. “We are projecting a drop in unit sales of more than 10% by the end of the year. We are in a context of stagnation of activity with rising costs, where six out of ten children in our country are in a situation of poverty and have a very compromised purchasing power, which attends to basic necessities. For this reason, we have moderate expectations for the end-of-year season,” he said. In relation to prices, games and toys of the national industry had an average year-on-year increase of 110%, below accumulated inflation (146%), and products can be found from $800, although there is a lot of price disparity.
In this context, as denounced by the Argentine Chamber of the Toy Industry, the Argentine market is explained by 30% of products that enter due to unfair trade practices and is saturated with products of dubious origin. “So much so that, in the face of the reduction in the participation of high-end toys in the Argentine market, the subsidiaries installed in the country of the largest multinationals in the world such as Mattel and Hasbro, which were partners of the chamber, were closed,” the entity said. On the other hand, the sector denounces that there are a large number of low-quality products on the market, which even do not comply with basic security systems. “They are produced with prohibited plasticizers that may contain carcinogenic elements that migrate to children’s bodies and can cause serious health problems in the future or detach small parts and cause asphyxiation,” the Chamber lamented. Some of these toys were entered in large volumes by new non-traditional importing companies that accessed the official dollar and that together, make up an economic group which leads the ranking of toy imports, measured in net kilograms,” they warned. In Argentina, 95% of the year’s total sales are concentrated in three moments: Children’s Day (60%), Christmas (35%) and Epiphany (5%). For this reason, the low expectations for the end-of-year holidays are a worrying scenario for merchants, especially after having had a Children’s Day with less movement than expected.” To stimulate sales, we will be developing a new edition of the Toy Store Night, a long-awaited event that will take place next Thursday, December 21 throughout the country,” they remarked.

Original source in Spanish