More people improving their homes instead of buying up are helping to boost the profits of companies such as Italtile. Italtile, a retailer and franchiser of local and imported tiles, sanitaryware, bathware, laminated flooring and other home-finishing products managed to buck the overall weak trend in the retail sector as more homeowners renovated instead of buying new properties. The group owns store brands Italtile, CTM and TopT. CEO Jan Potgieter, who has been at the helm for about two months, said on Friday: "What we see is that new build is very slow." An expected improvement in the situation had not happened. This, he said, was partly because of a slowdown in the top end of the market - not "necessarily because people can't afford it ... it's more of a wait-and-see game because of uncertainties and alternate investments. "They [consumers] haven't spent as much as we would have liked to see." TopT, which caters for lower-end consumers, was the star performer for the six months....
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