When the Tübingen book chain Osiander was not allowed to open its shops due to the lockdown, its owner Christian Riethmüller was sometimes on his bike for hours to personally bring his customers’ orders to their front door. Osiander offered this service even before Corona and expanded it during the crisis. “Our bicycle courier service has proven itself in the pandemic,” says Riethmüller. And since Osiander has set up a joint sales company with the book retail chain Thalia, bicycle couriers will also be on the road there in the future. “That plays an important role in local markets,” says Thalia boss Michael Busch, who may now have the opportunity to pedal professionally. Especially since the service is also good for the climate, as Busch said during the annual press conference.
Despite the bookstores being closed for months from December to May, the chain was able to increase its sales by around seven percent to more than 1.1 billion euros compared to the 2019/20 financial year – including around 80 branches in Austria, Switzerland and Germany Thalia operates around 330 branches. The Hagen chain is growing faster than the industry, which, according to the Börsenverein, achieved a sales increase of just 0.1 percent in 2020 and 3.9 percent by September 2021. Nevertheless: “Overall, Corona was a tough test for us,” says Busch. Especially since the important Christmas business has failed completely and sales in the shops have declined by around 16 percent.
On the other hand, the company has benefited from the expansion of its online business. Within a year, the share of the Internet platform in Thalia sales rose by twelve percentage points to 40 percent. “The crisis has put us in a position that we only thought possible in two to three years,” says Busch. The e-commerce business has grown by 65 percent as a result of the store closings, Thalia can at least partially offset sales fluctuations in the bookstores in the Internet business. However, Thalia’s share of the overall market has fallen slightly to 18 percent.
The e-book plays an important role; Thalia has a market share of 25 percent here. The company is one of the initiators of the Tolino Alliance, in which German booksellers have been offering their own reading device since 2013 – as a domestic alternative to the US retailer Amazon. The Tolino has a 44 percent market share, Amazon’s Kindle around 50 percent, this is “worldwide unique”, said Busch. In the USA, Amazon’s reading device accounts for 90 percent of the market, in Great Britain even 95 percent.
“We are now building the better platform with other booksellers”
It is unclear, however, to what extent the competition from other end devices could grow in the future. Ultimately, this is also a question of generation and budget, says analyst Werner Ballhaus from the consulting firm PwC. In the current Media Outlook, he expects e-books to grow by an average of 1.4 percent annually until 2025. “However, we tend to expect the importance of reading devices to decrease in the long term,” he says – in favor of other end devices such as tablets or smartphones. Especially since e-books only accounted for 6.2 percent of total sales in the public market in 2025 “and will therefore remain at a low level”. According to the branch association Börsenverein, it was 5.9 percent in 2020.
Following the example of the Tolino alliance, Busch wants to wrest market share from the US group in other respects as well. “Amazon is not destiny, we are now building the better platform with other booksellers,” says Busch. The background to this is a purchasing, sales and IT platform that Thalia is opening up to all booksellers – for a license fee. The most prominent member is the southern German chain Osiander with 69 branches, which remains independent within this partnership model, but is now completely integrated into the platform. From a purely visual point of view, the website looks like the Thalia world, but “we will not merge with Thalia,” assures Riethmüller, who previously worked closely with Mayerschen, which has been part of Thalia since 2019. Busch wants to win more booksellers for his platform, he does not see any antitrust problems. In addition, Thalia is increasingly supplying customers from outside the industry, such as the food retail sector, and equipping around 3,600 assortment and promotional areas for this purpose.
Busch expresses criticism of the federal government’s corona compensation policy. Thalia has so far lost around 65 million euros in profits because of the closings, and the state will reimburse around 18 million euros. This is “too little”. A federal share of 50 percent would have been fair.