you are driving on a main highway on the outskirts of any major Thai town, you’re bound to see at least three of them, often in proximity to one another and sitting on vast swathes of open land. Some of them are starting to look vulnerable.  Home improvement is among the biggest of the big-ticket retail categories, so it is cyclical in nature and highly susceptible to the ups and downs of the business cycle. The main players in the category continue to open new stores in an environment where DIY projects and expensive discretionary purchases are being postponed because of household indebtedness and weak consumer confidence. The strain of competition for a pie that isn’t growing as fast is showing up in the financial results. Who is feeling the pinch most? HomePro clings to its lead, but it’s slipping. HomePro, one of Thailand’s two biggest home improvement retailers by sales, announced recently that its revenues for the first quarter of 2025 fell by 0.7 per cent from the previous year, to 18.7 billion baht (US$584 million). The vast majority of that revenue stream comes from sales in its giant warehouses, which fell by almost exactly the same percentage.  The company continues to insist that it is on a ‘sustainable’ sales growth path, despite the fact that it lost ground in 2024 and again in the first quarter of this year. Moreover, if it were not for new additions to the store fleet over the course of the last year, things would have been bleaker, since same-store sales continued to wobble, falling by 3.3 per cent following a slightly larger loss in 2024 as a whole. The gross margin percentage dropped slightly, and so did after-tax profit, to 1.7 billion baht ($53 million).  The company is also, albeit to a much more limited extent, in the business of being a mall landlord because it gets rental income from its Market Village shopping mall in Hua Hin, a popular resort in Hua Hin on the picturesque Gulf of Thailand. The mall, which has only one other meaningful competitor in the area, is anchored by a Lotus’s hypermarket and by HomePro itself. Rental income from this source rose by 4.5 per cent in the first quarter as tourism growth strengthened foot traffic.  HomePro ended the quarter with 136 stores, including seven in Malaysia. Of the national store footprint in Thailand, 40 of its 94 units are in the all-important Greater Bangkok area. It plans to open another 12 stores by the end of 2025, further congesting the already fiercely competitive market. Central’s Thai Watsadu  Thai Watsadu, the home improvement arm of Central Retail Corporation, is running neck-and-neck with HomePro and Central has stated its ambition to be the biggest home improvement retailer in Southeast Asia. This doesn’t look like an unachievable goal. The company is very aggressive in its expansion in the region and claimed recently that Thai Watsadu “stood tall against headwinds” in the first quarter, reaching sales of about 19 billion baht (US$580 million), which just happens to be the same amount as HomePro.  Granted, these sales are not all from the company’s giant home improvement warehouses: Central also operates a motley assortment of chains in Thailand and Vietnam that sell electronics, white goods and office supplies. But as with HomePro, its sales performance hasn’t been great: Same-store sales for its hardlines category fell sharply, by 7 per cent, in the first quarter, underperforming its major competitor. At the end of the first quarter, the Thai Watsadu chain had been extended to a fleet of 87, and four more are planned for opening this year.  Siam Global House: Sales getting ugly HomePro and Thai Watsadu share the home improvement market with a bunch of smaller competitors. One of the more important ones is Siam Global House, which has its head office in the northeastern provincial city of Roi Et, but has a portfolio of 129 stores – 91 in Thailand, with the rest flung across the map of Southeast Asia and down into Indonesia.  The company notched up revenues of 8.4 billion baht (US$260 million) in the first quarter, a decrease of 4.4 per cent from a year ago despite the addition of seven giant superstores. Same-store sales experienced a nasty decline of 10 per cent. The gross product margin was improved a little, but net after-tax profit fell by 14.7 per cent to 617 million baht ($19 million). Global House has responded to the increasing competition with marketing events and a store renovation program.  Mr DIY has a unique piece of the action There are other powerful and popular players in the Southeast Asia DIY market, including Mr DIY, which has its origin in Malaysia but operates more than 2000 stores in 10 countries, including more than 900 in Thailand. The difference between Mr DIY and the major DIY operators in Thailand is that it operates smaller formats that don’t include building materials, meaning that it can slip into small spaces and even operate out of malls and infill locations. This enables it to offer a more pleasing shopping experience and gives it a unique market position: A vantage point from which to nibble away at the small-goods sales of the home-grown players. Is the tide going out? Consumer indebtedness and a shaky economy are taking out the tide that Buffett muses about, and it is clearly having its impact on all the major home improvement players in the region, turning some stores into giant mausoleums most days of the week. It isn’t sustainable in the long run. If the economy through the rest of 2025 is like this, the existence of some of these stores will look highly questionable.