Insight

A review and preview of the global fastener market

Named after the Roman god who is often depicted as having two faces – due to its ability to look to the future and to the past – the Janus Perspective is a unique feature that includes a wide cross section of global fastener business leaders, who have all contributed their retrospective of 2019 and thoughts on prospects and challenges for 2020.

Ekkehard Beermann, managing director

As an import and wholesale specialist selling exclusively to distributors all over Europe, we already noticed in Fall 2018 that the market was about to change compared to previous years.

While 2017 and 2018 were dominated by globally strong demand; price increases mainly due to the price rally of raw material; as well as long production lead times; the period of ‘high pressure buying’ started to come to an end towards the last quarter of 2018.

The stock level in European warehouses had then recovered after two years of extremely long replenishment delivery times, of up to nine months, and subsequently rose to a very high-level at the beginning of 2019. When the market realised the significance of this high stock level, European purchase order volumes to the Far East dropped significantly, which resulted in open production capacities in Asia and falling prices for both Chinese wire rod and finished goods.

Apart from fastener specific reasons, it is important to also mention the direct impact the trade war between the United States and PR China had on our industry, with US purchasing volumes being shifted from China to other Asian countries and the Chinese steel market overall reducing their price level due to low market demand. High fastener stock levels in Europe and decreasing buying prices in Asia led almost instantly to the first price reductions in the European market, which intensified over the course of the year.

Meanwhile the ongoing controversial issue of BREXIT has created a massive amount of uncertainty in the market and created almost a deadlock situation, especially in the UK with many customers reporting that various new projects had been put on hold until plannability had returned in one way or another.

2019 has been another year that proves how fast situations can change from one direction to another in today’s globalised and digitised world and how instant market mechanisms react on any change of policy and setting. It sharpened our senses and certainly improved our ability to handle transition periods.

At Fastbolt we were able to successfully navigate through these complex market conditions and managed to develop our business in many areas. While our stock range – which we keep in our three warehouses in Germany, the UK and Portugal – for distributors all over Europe – went through various steps of extensions, our in-house team of digital application engineers helped us to follow our path of digitisation and process optimisation.

We added many new and value adding functionalities within our well-known e-commerce platform FBonline, which further increases the advantages and possibilities our customers have when using our online system. Supplying the European distribution market with a specialised range of mostly standard fasteners requires a high-level of quality consistence, process efficiency and logistical excellence. While customer requirements are growing, I am convinced that we can only ensure this in the future through the application of modern technology in all areas of our business.

Therefore, our strategy for the upcoming year has a strong focus on developing and applying technology that helps us to create sustainable and recognisable advantages to our customers.

As our first development milestone of the new year, we will launch FBonline2020 in the first quarter – offering completely new technological and commercial opportunities to fastener distributors in Europe. In addition, we have already taken the next decisions on product range extensions, which are planned to be made public and to become available in our warehouses towards the second quarter of 2020.

The markets overall have been in better condition and it might take time until a more positive trend throughout many fastener applying industries becomes visible again, but at Fastbolt we still prefer to act and progress than to sit and wait for better times. We look forward to 2020!