Czech real retail sales excluding automotive rose by 2.5% year-on-year in July, yet fell 0.3% on a month-on-month basis. Sales of motor vehicles and repairs gained 4.8% YoY and 1.5% MoM. On a monthly basis, non-food goods sales lost 0.4%, food sales 0.2%, while fuel sales remained unchanged. In annual terms, sales of fuels added 8.3% and of non-food goods 3.5%, while food sales declined by 0.9%.
Sales in specialised food stores dropped by 1.4% YoY. In non-specialised stores with food as the primary commodity, sales declined by 0.9% YoY in July. Meanwhile, sales gained 7.9% YoY in non-specialised stores with predominantly non-food products, and sales in online stores added 6.7% YoY.
For now, we attribute the noticeably different annual dynamics in food segment stores and non-food segment stores to the holiday effect, where households tend to spend less on Czech food products because of holidays spent abroad. July’s annual growth figure is also affected by a noticeable upward revision to July 2024’s datapoint.