The past few months have been interesting for the extrusion manufacturing industry. Let us try and understand what we can expect from the market in the forthcoming months.
If you’re in the business then you’ll know that a great way of gauging the industry pulse is through your sales and marketing teams; take feedback from them to find out how business investments in the sector are doing. European pipe manufacturers, for example, have been treading cautiously with regards to investments into their business so far this year. One reason for this is that large manufacturers based out of Europe are going through a period of internal restructuring and concentrating on shifting manufacturing to regions with low labor and power costs – thus there are almost no noteworthy investments that one notices in Europe. The same can be said for European window manufacturers.
This restructuring in the European market has meant that there is a lot of high quality used machinery of European make out there in the used machines market; this is great news for interested buyers that are looking for good machinery at reasonable rates. There do not seem to be any major investments afoot anywhere right now for a full scale extrusion plant. In fact, because of this there could be a shortage of European used machinery in the middle term.
What European sellers of used machinery need to keep in mind is that in certain countries, for example, India and Brazil, the local extrusion machinery manufacturers offer cheap and sturdy machinery at low prices. Therefore, local buyers in these countries have a choice between competitively priced European machinery and new machinery manufactured locally and priced attractively. Add to this import regulations in certain countries and we see that sellers of used machines originating in Europe have a rather difficult task on hand.
On the other hand, in certain regions, such as the Middle East, there is high demand for used pipe manufacturing machinery. German and Italian brands are doing exceedingly well in this region. In fact, machinery from these two European countries is in maximum demand. Latin America represents another very active market for such machinery; however, the current conversion rates are making it difficult for buyers to get good deals.
North Africa will also emerge as a market in due time. Once political stabilization happens in North Africa and restructuring plus industrialization begins, the region will become a major buyer of used machinery.
