Orders up 8% in March
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, June 28, 2004
Grand Rapids, Mich. — Encouraging news has finally arrived for the office furniture business, perhaps evidence that the long-awaited recovery may be picking up steam.
Orders in March grew 8% year-over-year to $740 million, the largest rate of growth since October 2000, according to the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Assn. This was the fourth consecutive month of non-negative order growth, signaling an improvement in order trends as opposed to the stabilization through most of the second half of 2003.
Although the comparison hurdle was not difficult given the weak numbers of early 2003, it represents a huge improvement compared with March of the previous three years, when the industry registered declines of 17% in 2003, 24% in 2002 and 9% in 2001.
March shipments were also robust, with shipment growth increasing 5% on a year-over-year basis. This was the second consecutive month of positive shipment growth and the fifth in the past nine months, clearly an improvement on the 28 consecutive months of shipping declines from early 2001 through the middle of last year.
