For the fifth year in a row, Fnac suffered financial losses in Belgium. While holding company Fnac Darty came to the rescue once more with a fifteen million euro injection, one wonders what the future will have in store for the electronics and leisure chain.
Slight improvement
Within the Belgian branch, which accounts for a turnover of 545 million euros and a profit of 11.7 million, Fnac is the weak little brother. The chain closed the 2021 financial year with a loss of 5.6 million euros, business newspaper L’Echo reported. That is better than the 9.5 million euro loss in 2020 (at the height of the pandemic), but it is already the fifth consecutive year of losses for Fnac Belgium. Turnover did rise from 124 to 137 million euros, but remains below the 2019 level of 157 million euros. At the end of last year, the company sat with negative equity of 5.4 million euros.
The French parent company now hands its Belgian subsidiary fifteen million euros to erase these and future losses. The question is how Fnac plans to become profitable again: the chain is suffering greatly from digitisation, which replaced the once lucrative sales of CDs and DVDs with the rise of streaming services. However, online sales did double last year. With a new shop in the Woluwe Shopping Centre last spring, the chain now has fourteen physical shops in Belgium and Luxembourg.
