Fashion-dependent industries receive the highest revenue replacement, car and furniture trade the least – in total up to 1.5 billion euros.
According to calculations by various institutes, the retail sector, which has been severely affected by the lockdown, will get back more than one billion euros from the state's revenue replacement. The industry-related economic research institute EcoAustria has calculated, according to the “Kleine Zeitung”, a compensation claim of the trade of around 350 million euros per week. The socially liberal Momentum Institute is assuming a total of 1.5 billion euros for almost three weeks of closure.
The retail trade receives a sales compensation of 20, 40 or 60 percent, depending on the affected person. Criteria are the gross profit typical of the industry (note: difference between sales revenues and the use of goods or materials), possible catch-up effects and the saleability of the goods, i.e. their seasonality and perishability. Applications can be submitted via the Finanzonline portal by December 15. The private trade association, which mainly represents large trading companies, expects a loss of sales of almost one billion euros per lockdown week.
Clothing stores and the trade in shoes and leather goods as well as the sale of flowers, plants and live animals receive 60 percent of their sales from the state during the closing phase compared to the same period of the previous year. 40 percent of sales are replaced by booksellers, toys, bicycles, sporting goods, office supplies, antiques and textiles. The jewelry and watch trade as well as the metal and building supplies trade can also expect 40 percent of the previous year's turnover. There is a 20 percent revenue replacement for the car and furniture trade as well as sellers of household, entertainment and telecommunications equipment.
According to calculations by EcoAustria, the car trade can expect a replacement rate of almost 100 million euros, the clothing trade with 62 million euros, metal goods and construction supplies with 32 million and the furniture trade over 18 million euros per week of closure.
Gastronomy and tourism are compensated with 80 percent. The Momentum Institute estimates the cost of this at just under 2 billion euros. For guests who could not come, the business is gone and cannot be made up or caught up – this explains the different treatment of trade and gastronomy or tourism.
The left institute Momentum speaks of “over-funding” and even sees a better situation for some industries than last year. “If you add up the state economic subsidies for short-time work and sales replacement and take into account the entire sales development in the first lockdown as well as the sales that have been made up afterwards, a number of retail sectors are much better off before the Christmas business than last year,” said Oliver Picek, chief economist of the Momentum Institute, on Wednesday according to a broadcast. For individual groups, the situation could “of course be very tough”, but at the branch level the think tank sees this in the figures “by no means” for all companies. “So far, the average has remained a plus in many industries,” says Picek.
Figures from Statistics Austria are only available for the period from January to September. While the grocery trade achieved real sales growth of almost 7 percent in the first nine months, sales in the non-grocery trade fell by an average of 3.5 percent. The clothing and shoe trade was particularly hard hit, with real sales declines averaging a fifth. The winners, on the other hand, included not only food retail but also mail order and internet retailing with real sales growth of 12 percent. Furniture, do-it-yourself supplies and electrical goods were also in great demand this year from January to September, with the result that the shops (in real terms) turned over around 4 percent more on average. In pharmacies and cosmetics retailers, sales fell slightly by 2 percent during this period.
