Spain’s Inditex Group clothing brand ZARA’s sales this year increased by US$3.2 billion compared with before the epidemic. Swedish groups H&M and GAP have not yet reached this level, and Uniqlo barely exceeded US$182 million. ZARA’s net sales at the end of the first nine months of 2022 (from February to October) were 23.055 billion euros, an increase of 16.3% compared with before the epidemic. During the above-mentioned period, its revenue was 19.82 billion euros.
H&M is its main global competitor, with sales of 14.812 billion euros in the first nine months of this year (from December to August), a decrease of 5.79% from 2019. In other words, its sales are still 910 million lower than before the epidemic, which means that compared with Inditex Group, its ability to recover from the epidemic is lower.
Although H&M grew 10% in Q4 (from September to November), all of this growth was due to currency effects, Inditex reports Sales at the beginning of the fourth quarter, which includes the first weeks of November and December, were up 12% at constant exchange rates, the company said. American brand GAP has issued invoices of US$10.686 billion in the first nine months of its fiscal year (February-October), a decrease of 2.87% from US$11.002 billion in sales during the same period during the epidemic.
Similar to the situation of H&M, GAP not only did not grow at the rate of Inditex, but its sales were US$316 million lower than before the epidemic. Revenue in the first nine months of this year was US$10.686 billion, a decrease of 6.3%, or US$725 million, from its business in the same period in 2021. Inditex sales during the same period increased from 19.325 billion in the first nine months of 2021 to 23.055 billion in the same period of 2022, an increase of 19.3% (an increase of 3.73 billion).
Inditex’s other major global competitor is Japan’s Uniqlo Group, whose sales have exceeded pre-epidemic sales, although its growth rate is much lower than ZARA’s. parent company. Sales from December 2021 to August 2022 are 11.409 billion, representing an increase of 1.62% over the same period in 2019. So it added sales of 182 million euros during the period, which represents growth but is 18 times less than Inditex. If you analyze only its evolution over the past year, Uniqlo’s sales in the period from December 2021 to August 2022 increased by $1.088 billion compared to the same period last year, which is 3.4 times less than Inditex’s growth of $3.73 billion in 2018. The first nine months of this year compared with the same period in 2021.
