"Sales remained almost nil over this month as political instability and frequent general strike forced market to remain closed over the past few weeks," said Binaya Tripathi, deputy general manager of Him Electronics that deals with Samsung home appliances.[break]
Though distributors and retailers operated normally on the days when banda were not enforced, they said they could not find any buyers.
"Customers exhibit typical purchase behavior. Instead of rushing to buy electronic appliances in the intermittent period (of banda), they prefer to wait and buy them when situation normalizes," said Purushottam Bhandari, Chief of Sales of CG Impex.
The gloomy outlook has handed a severe blow to the electronics distributors and dealers who had started to see their business pick up since the last couple of months after a long period of low sales.
The gloom prevailed for the past one year mainly as remittances - the major factor that keeps the market moving - grew only at a nominal rate of 10 percent in 2010/11. Protracted power cuts then drove away the potential customers.
But situation had started to change lately, particularly after remittances grew by 35 percent this year.
"Demand was building up steadily since few months and our sales grew by 15 to 30 percent," said Tripathy.
CG Impex, which deals with LG electronic home appliances, said its own sales grew by 25 to 30 percent over the past few months. "But banda has thrown the business off track like never before," Bhandari said.
Store that deal with different brands of home appliances like refrigerator, microwave oven and washing machine of Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Whirlpool and Godrej said the banda has caused their businesses to lose tempo.
"It has put brakes on our business. I wonder how long we will need to wait again for the sales to pick up," said Lila Hari Aryal, proprietor of Malika Trade Link located in Dillibazar.
Aryal, who informed Republica that he was selling 30-35 units of refrigerator in the month before the current political mess, said wedding season in March and slight cut in load-shedding hours had set the tone for the demand to grow two months ago.
Though the next wedding season is just about a month away, he doubted if that will bring magic to his business given the problems over constitution drafting and confusion over how the politics will move in the days ahead.
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