A growth segment in the making

Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia are the principal growth markets for the garden pond segment in Eastern Europe. Nowhere is the proportion of home ownership as high as in these countries. The advent of DIY stores such as Praktiker and Hornbach from Germany or Mr Bricolage and Bricostore from France has precipitated a wave of home renovation and a desire among the inhabitants to improve the quality of their home and living.Attractive show ponds can boost sales of garden pond ranges.Of course, the garden pond is not new in Eastern Europe. Sections of the population have always created garden ponds, albeit from simple materials for the most part during the era of Communist rule, because there was nothing to buy. But even after the fall of Communism, only the more elevated sections of society were able to create a garden pond initially. For some years, however, a growing interest in garden ponds has been observed among the middle classes. Thus private house builders are opting more and more frequently to create a pond.The marketThe talk is of big growth rates, even if no official market data are yet forthcoming from the countries featured here. The idea of a garden pond was practically non-existent in Bulgaria up to two or three years ago, and only the odd pond could be found here and there on the outskirts of large cities such as Sofia, Plovdiv or Varna, as a leading wholesaler commented to PET in Europe. It is only in the last 24 months - in parallel with the upward economic trend in the country - that an increasing number of private citizens have built their own houses, many of them complete with a garden pond. The same also goes for hotels in tourism centres on the Black Sea, some of which have added large show ponds in recent years during the course of renovation.Bricostore in Bucharest offers primarily preformed pond liners along with lining and gravel materials for building your own garden pond.The situation in Poland is quite similar. Here manufacturers and wholesalers are in agreement in speaking of annual growth in this sector in the order of 25 per cent, decisively influenced by new privately built housing. And it's the same in Hungary, where the garden pond is even considered the most rapidly expanding segment in the pet and horticultural sector. According to one supplier of aquatic plants and plants for the margins of the pond, an increasing number of garden designers and landscapers are specialising in pond…