New trend on washer market

For years, washing machines have been just some home appliances whose price was the only thing that mattered as far as buyers were concerned. Not anymore. The decision to buy such an appliance has lately started being based on the maximum number of rotations, on how silent it is or on how many programmes it has. In other words, the premium category is gaining increasingly more clients and will come to account for about 10% of a market set to grow by more than 60% this year compared to the 250,000 units sold last year. The reason is simple, as players on the domestic home appliances market say: the consumer credit. “The consumer credit boom in late last year and all through this year has made premium products affordable for more clients,” explains Eugen Paturan, country manager of Italian producer Merloni Elettrodomestici, which sells Indesit and Ariston brands on the Romanian market. As a matter of fact, the company introduced its latest washing machine model on the Romanian market this fall, after having launched it in Western Europe this spring. The new model retails for 19 million ROL and is the most silent such appliance on the market, Merloni officials say. “We introduced this model on the local market because the features a Western European wants their washing machine to have – sleek design, silent operation or ease of use, have now become some of the features more and more Romanians are asking for,” Paturan added. ZF