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COVID 19 RUINS THE FIRST SIX MONTHS BELGIAN PARQUET PRODUCTION CONTINUES TO STRUGGLE Vivaldi polyphony With the new current government, led by the Flemish liberal Alexander De Croo, it is already clear that a lack of dynamic impulse will be a big problem. It is no coincidence that the government has been nicknamed ‘Vivaldi’ after the masterpiece The Four Seasons because the colours of each season are represented by the seven parties now governing the country. After a transitional government had tackled the first wave of covid 19 infections with various contortions, the new government has had to tackle the second wave. There were no specific figures available when this magazine went to press, but it is already apparent that this government is having to improvise a lot. At the start of November, Belgium was top of a list of 31 European countries in terms of corona infections. This illustrates indirectly how difficult it is to govern this country.
Economic dynamism
It’s no coincidence that Belgium gave rise to surrealism. The country certainly has an ideal central location in Europe, with Brussels having housed European institutions for several decades. However, it certainly isn’t the easiest place to do business, partly due to its form of government. Some matters are decided at federal level, others at regional level, and you need to be steeped in constitutional law to be absolutely sure of what’s decided where. The only way to understand Belgium is to delve into its history. When the country was officially created in 1830, this was mainly to keep the then European major powers apart from each other and thereby reduce the chance of any conflict. And so, Belgium was born, but the result, for convenience, was that basically two totally different linguistic communities had to ‘enjoy each other’s company’ and share a king from the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a German dynasty. Nowadays, we make a simple caricature of the whole business. In the north we have Flanders, Wallonia in the south, and in the middle Brussels, of which up to the present time not a single Belgian has established whether this is now Flemish, Walloon, or some other sort of territory. Dutch is spoken in the north, French in the south, and both languages in the centre, but all that doesn’t make communication any easier. That has been further illustrated by the recent government formation. This time, after the elections of 26 May 2019, negotiations lasted no fewer than 493 days before the players eventually formed a government for Belgium. Yet even that wasn’t a record in recent history. That honour fell to the government of the Walloon socialist Elio Di Rupo, which was sworn in on 6 December 2011 after 541 days of negotiations.
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If we consider the country from an economic perspective, there, too, we see a different dynamism between both parts of the country (for the sake of convenience, let’s forget that there is even a small German-speaking region). Whilst at the start of the 20th century it was mainly the industrialised Wallonia which was thriving, in recent decades the balance has shifted to the other side with a much more wealthy Flanders. Obviously, the parquet industry also shows a similar dynamic. This takes nothing away from the fact that Belgium is only a minor player in wooden floor production (production in 2019 was 41,576m² for a total value of 1,523,833 euros i.e. 36.86 euros per square metre). Moreover, other figures (obtained from Fedustria, the Belgian professional association of companies from the textile, wood, and furniture industries) show that covid 19 has severely hampered the parquet industry in 2020.
Production in NACE sector 1622 Whilst in 2019 there was a modest turnover of 23,355,000 euros in the NACE sector 1622 (production of parquet floors, NACE is an acronym which means General Nomenclature of Economic Activities in the European Communities), it was clear well before the end of 2020 that the total amount would fall sharply. The first six months recorded a sharp fall of almost 35% (in the first six months of 2020 there was a turnover of 8,443,000 euros as compared to 12,855,000 in the first six months of 2019). A fall as a result of covid 19 is only logical, but nevertheless it has been particularly sharp. If we compare this with another sector which has been in difficulty in recent years, namely the furniture sector, we note that the latter has stood up much better. In the first six months of 2020, the turnover of the Belgian furniture industry was 924.7 million euros, a fall of 12.1% as compared to the first six months of 2019, and that speaks volumes.
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