IADS Exclusive: Global Department Store Monitor 2023-2024
The IADS Global Department Store Monitor was originally launched in May 2021 by Dr. Christopher Knee as the ‘IADS 100 Report’ after realising that comparable department store data was either unavailable, poorly understood, or not exploited by analysts. This was characteristic of an ever-evolving industry, making it difficult for outsiders to understand, including events such as privatisation, mergers, change in ownership, or simply not categorising numbers by business uniti.
Since then, the report has been renamed and rebuilt into a new format to enable dynamic comparison among department stores over a specific period and a series of years. To track and compare sales and profits from companies worldwide while accounting for fluctuations in exchange rates, the renewed version of the monitor includes current (as of today) and fixed exchange rates (as of 2021) to isolate the impact of sales growth from the effect of exchange rate changes.
Also, given that accounting standards across countries are not uniform, the fiscal year is referred to as FY 2023-2024 throughout the monitor to compare results across the occurrence of the same world events. This uniformity helps maintain a baseline in the events that have occurred throughout the year to draw fair conclusions. The conception of this monitor was driven by the need to juxtapose pre- and post-COVID-19 results. The 2025 edition of the IADS Global Department Store Monitor reviews 59 department stores with publicly available information to create a benchmark for global department store stakeholders regarding the 2023-2024 period.
This report attempts to capture the global economic retail scenario post-COVID-19 and whether pre-COVID-19 numbers have been regained or are faltering.
[i] And a reason for international analytic platforms such as the International Association of Department Stores to exist in the first place.
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