- Title: NETHERLANDS: Flowers to bring cheer even in slowdown says flower auction house
- Date: 10th February 2008
- Summary: FLOWER TRANSPORT HALL AT THE FLOWER AUCTION HOUSE
- Embargoed: 25th February 2008 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Netherlands
- Country: Netherlands
- Topics: Industry,Lifestyle
- Reuters ID: LVAD00RPJ8137PZ5O86FJC499R2Z
- Story Text: With less than 10 days to go before the world festival of love on Valentine's day, flower sales are booming and there is no sign that the world economic slump will stop the romantic urge to buy red roses.
The world's biggest flower auction, in the Dutch town of Aalsmeer, says it still expects bumper sales in the run up to Valentine's Day, despite signs of a global economic slowdown, as folk need cheering up in hard times.
The CEO of the Dutch auction house FloraHolland Timo Huges says the official day of love is the most important trading day of the year. In fact business starts hotting up as much as 2 weeks before the big day.
"As a matter of fact it is one of the most important, the important day, in the year. Roughly, we trade in the week, head off in the advance of Valentine's day, we trade twice as much on a average day during the year, and which is picking up 2-3 weeks in advance to Valentines day,"
says Huges.
The auction's daily trade volumes tend to double in the week before the Valentine's festival of love on Feb. 14, as buyers scramble to stock up their shelves with the romantic.
Huges says the red and white roses are a particular hit. And a quarter of the sales are in the red, colour of passion.
"In general you can say Valentine's day, as it says is also day of love. The red and white rose are doing very good, tulips in generally speaking is also very popular product this particular moment and what you see, especially because it's a day of giving flowers to your relatives, to people close by that the mixed bouquets are popular as well," Huges says.
Huges said production was growing in African countries like Ethiopia and also in South America. He said there had been marginal disruption to supply from major rose producer Kenya due to the violence that erupted after a disputed Dec. 27 election.
He said the larger Kenyan growers who keep their workers close to their compounds have maintained a good supply of flowers to the airports.
So in the end no more than 3 percent of supply was affected
"Well, we have a lot of trade, supply from Kenya towards the market place in The Netherlands.Yes there has been some impact, but it's not as severe as we were expecting," Huges said FloraHolland merged with another Dutch auction group, Aalsmeer Flower Auction, at the start of this year. They had combined turnover of 4 billion euros ($5.93 billion) in 2007.
Roughly 11 billion flowers and 1.2 billion plants were processed by the two auction groups last year.
The Netherlands is the world's biggest exporter of flowers with a share of around 60 percent of global exports, Huges said. About 85 percent of flowers processed by FloraHolland are sent to Europe, with Germany, Britain and France the main customers.
FloraHolland is based at a sprawling auction house in Aalsmeer, where some trading rooms are packed with buyers assessing the latest carts of flowers and discussing trends.
But Huges said more and more trade was being done online, with remote buying doubling every year for the past three years.
Only 50 percent of the flowers sold are actually seen with the naked eye now he says.
Under the Aalsmeer auction, prices are gradually lowered until a bid is made. As flowers are displayed, a huge clock ticks down and so does the price until a binding bid is made.
Huges said the two Dutch auctions had decided to merge partly to deal with increasing competition as the industry becomes more globalised and direct trade increases.
"If you look at the biggest competition for the Netherlands in itself, there you could say that the direct trade between the production areas and the consuming areas is the biggest, which you could say threat, to the Dutch system that we built over the last decades," Huges says.
We asked Huges if he was worried about the economic slow down and if that would affect sales:
"Not so much, we have seen with this aspect (recession) that took place in the past, that there´s always a need for the people to buy flowers and plants. Generally you could say that perhaps, that the higher end of the production, more expensive flowers and plants are perhaps traded by less expensive, but in general volume wise we do not for see a huge impact from the economical slow down that we see world wise," he says.
Moreover, flower buying is picking up particularly in eastern Europe and Russia now that these countries' infrastructure is getting better. He said it helps sales to see big retail companies setting up shopping malls from Prague to Bratislava where there is are large populations and therefore more money to be spent.
The top three most popular flowers remain fairly consistent, he said, with roses in the top spot, tulips coming in second and chrysanthemums third in line. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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