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News Release, 
August 14, 2005

OFFICE FURNITURE CONSUMPTION IN
CANADA AND FORECAST TO 2015

A new report on the Canadian Office furniture Market analyzes the economic and demographic forces impacting the Canadian demand for office furniture. The study is finely segregated by product categories, end-user categories and geographical regions. Forecasts are provided to 2015. The author of the book comes to some interesting and unexpected conclusions which need to be taken into account to gain a thorough appreciation of the present and future course of the Canadian office furniture demand.

The Canadian market for office furniture (at retail prices) in 2004 totaled $5,947 million, up 7.3% over 2003. This was the 13^th year in a row with positive growth. On an historic perspective, the office furniture market is ahead by 118% between 1994 and 2004. Even if expressed in constant dollar terms the advance of 87% is still quite respective.

The key contributors to office employment are finance,   professional and technical services, management services, and government. We expect that office furniture intensive employment will continue to grow faster than non-office intensive employment. In fact, we foresee overall gain in office employment  of 20% or approximately 690,000 persons between 2004 and 2015.   

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In particular, professional and technical services as well as management services will grow at an above-average pace.

Due to the above mentioned employment trends, we believe that growth this year ?as well as in all years within our prediction period (2005 ?2015) ?will remain positive ? both in value and unit terms, hovering around the 4 to 7% range. For this year, we anticipate a market value of C$ 6,369 million, up from C$ 5,947 million last year. If our predictions are correct, the market value would top the C$ 10 billion mark in 2015.

The office furniture market is about evenly divided among seats (both of the metal and non-metal variety), all other metal office furniture, and all other non-metal office furniture. The impact new technologies in the office environment caused some shifts in the market composition of office furniture during the past ten years along the following lines:

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seats increased their share from 31% to 35%. The advance applies to both metal and non-metal seats, as well as to swivel and other seats.

non-metal office furniture gained market share at the expense of metal office furniture.

There is a shift away from desks towards other forms of office employee accommodation, especially toward systems combining work-tops and storage.