Margins and profitability in retail sale of clothing

Retail sale of clothingNACE 47.710

116 Norwegian companies in this industry. The median company kept 3.0 % of every krone.

22 % of the companies in this industry posted a negative operating result that year.

The distribution

What companies in the industry earned

One tenth of companies fell below -6.7 %, and one tenth above 9.7 %. That is the real spread in the industry, not an average.

Top against weakest third

Top third
8.4 %
Weakest third
-2.3 %
Spread
11 percentage points
Equity ratio
38.9 %median of 110

Size

Profitability by size

Profitability by size
RevenueCompaniesMedian operating margin
5 to 20 m12-0.6 %
20 to 100 m663.3 %
over 100 m383.6 %

Companies are split into revenue bands, with the median margin in each. Bands with fewer than ten companies are omitted, because the median becomes too unstable to show.

Geography

Where the companies are based

  • Oslo1
  • Trondheim1
  • Ski1
  • Molde1
  • Spillum1
  • Vestby1

The six postal towns with the most companies in this industry, by registered business address.

Public contracts

Who in the industry wins public contracts

3 of 116 companies in the industry have won at least one public contract since 2022, that is 2.6 %.

Only 3 companies in the industry have won a public contract since 2022. That is too few for us to say how large they are compared with the rest.

The 5 contracts we find come most often from these buyers.

  • Ålesund kommune2
  • Ålesund brannvesen KF1
  • Forsvaret v/Forsvarets logistikkorganisasjon1
  • Universitetet I Bergen1

Contracts come from Doffin and TED. Our collection is not complete, and TED covers only contracts above the EEA threshold, so the figures are a floor and not a full count. We say what we find, not what exists.

Questions and answers

Common questions about retail sale of clothing

What is a normal operating margin in retail sale of clothing?
The median company kept 3.0 % of every krone. That means half of the 116 companies in the sample were above it, and half below.
What separates the best from the weakest in retail sale of clothing?
The top third kept 8.4 % of every krone, against -2.3 % for the weakest third. The spread is 11 percentage points, and that is within the same industry, the same country and the same year.
How many companies are there in retail sale of clothing in Norway?
We hold filed accounts for 116 Norwegian companies on this industry code with at least one million kroner in revenue. The real number is higher, since dormant and very small companies are excluded.
How many are loss-making in retail sale of clothing?
22 % of the companies in the sample posted a negative operating result.
How large is a typical company in retail sale of clothing?
Median revenue is 55.5 m kr. Half of the companies fall between 29.8 m kr and 166.1 m kr.
How much do public contracts matter in retail sale of clothing?
We find almost no public contracts in this industry since 2022, so public procurement appears to play little role here.

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Related industries

Other industries in the same group

Method. 116 companies registered on industry code 47.710 (Retail sale of clothing) with filed accounts and at least one million kroner in revenue. The figures come from the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises and are public. Operating margin is operating profit divided by operating revenue.

Each company appears with the most recent accounts we hold for it. For the great majority that is the 2024 filing. Around eight per cent had already filed for 2025 when we collected, and for those the 2025 figures apply. We therefore write "latest accounts" rather than naming a single year.

We show one cross-section and no trend line. Our database has broad coverage for the most recent accounting year, but only a small and non-random sample for earlier years. A curve over time would therefore measure who we happened to collect, not what happened in the industry.

Companies with under one million in revenue are excluded, because dormant limited companies would otherwise pull the median down. We do not publish an industry page until we hold at least 30 companies.

This is a description of an industry, not a ranking of companies. We name no individual company here.

Ohmsyn is built by Erik Harry Høydal.