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 2021 and thoughts on prospects and challenges for 2022.

Jody Brugola, president

Brugola OEB Industriale SpA was born in 1926, from Egidio Brugola, the inventor of the hexagonal socket head cap screw, which was patented in 1945. In 2021 Brugola turned 95, which means 95 years of experience in production of critical bolts – those bolts dedicated to assembling an engine’s vital components.

The company is now on the third generation of the family and is recognised as a market leader of critical fasteners for the automotive industry. Brugola has a network of sales offices on a global level, covering the most important markets, with 11 production plants in Italy and one in the USA, which opened in 2015.

Until 2020 Brugola produced 1.8 billion pieces, annually, with almost 800 different types of fasteners, but unfortunately the first half of 2021 has been inevitably characterised by the trend of the worldwide pandemic, but not yet effected by the lack of raw materials and semiconductors that is currently affecting the automotive market.

The semiconductor shortage, coming from Asia – the main worldwide producer, is causing a decline of fastener and component orders for the automotive world. The automotive industry is recording a negative trend in car production quantifiable at approximately 7.7 million vehicles worldwide, of course this situation is inevitably reflected in our company. However, Brugola never stops and proves to be a company that continually wants to innovate, evolve and grow. Already in the second half of 2019 we started a process of enlarging the range of fasteners offered, in order to diversify our portfolio in automotive and other different industries.

We also started the process of moving forward with increasingly complex, sophisticated and high performance products, as well as continuously working on keeping quality standards high. We have also started looking away from the automotive sector and we’re getting involved with key niche markets.

In the last few years, we have carried out an important generational change and we now have a lot of young people with many new ideas and projects in the company.

Brugola has always focused on customers and market requests, that’s why over the past few years we have moved to producing components for eMobility. The strategy of focusing on manufacturing products destined to the new platforms for electric vehicles partially balanced the reduction of orders caused by the raw materials and semiconductors shortage. In addition, in the last few years Brugola has researched innovative raw materials, whilst respecting the ones that we have used over the last 95 years. We are able to work with aluminium, stainless steel, copper and heat resistance alloy.

Thanks to the study of these new raw materials, Brugola has been involved in the design side of various projects, including turbo chargers, heavy trucks and battery packs. We are confident we will be able to go into series production of the new products in the second half of 2022.

Despite the difficulties that we suffered in 2021, we have been able to continue the process of innovation and to continue our investment – enabling us to be ready as soon as the markets start to grow again.

What do we expect from 2022? Today’s forecasts indicate that the first part of the year will still be tough, but then we think that the situation will improve. We will be ready when the automotive industry, as well as other markets, bounce back and finally we will reap the fruits of our two years of effort and we will return to growth.