Sourcing control panel components
05Mar
posted by: Malcolm Greenhill, Charter Controls
Fortunately, I love travelling, which is just as well, as six years ago I was asked to source a large volume of low-voltage control and automation products for a major global distribution customer. Every year since then, I've spent a lot of time in India, China, Taiwan, America and the EU at exhibitions and visiting factories to assess manufacturing quality and negotiate volume prices with many manufacturers.
The flying is mainly smooth, but the commercials are often bumpy – particularly following the 2016 vote to leave the EU. The pound crashed against global currencies, increasing the price of everything we source and only now that Brexit is behind us, are we starting to see a recovery.
Most global trade is conducted in US$. At the start of the day on 23 June 2016, a product costing $10 cost us £6.80. By the end of the day, the same $10 product cost £7.63, and by January 2017, that had increased again to £8.33, +22.5 percent. It was worse in 2008/9 during the global financial crisis when product prices increased by 30 percent, and I don’t mind saying that it almost put us out of business.
More recently, COVID-19 has caused massive increases in global air and sea-freight rates and, together with the final throes of Brexit, it has caused chaos in the global shipping sector. One of our consignments from India bounced around five different Middle East ports on various ships before finally heading for Felixstowe.
Read the full article in the March issue of PBSI
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