The paper describes an empirical investigation about the arithmetical strategies of primary school children dealing with mutiplicative real-world situations. We constructed three multiplicative settings, similar to each other in their arithmetical structure but different in the situational contexts. 66 second-graders - age 7 to 8 - and 56 third-graders - age 8 to 9 - solved in pairs of two of these problems. The results show that children did not use addition as their main strategy but preferred counting and number patterns. Several hypothesis are discussed explaining these results. The conclusions drawn depend on the preferred hypothesis.