2010 is Freefoam’s 20th year in business. Were summers really better back then? Was the future looking so much brighter than today?
Being honest about it, no, not in that way. The last 20 years has been a series of cycles through the same issues of growth, pause, rebuff competitor attacks, develop your own growth (and attack) strategies, re-invest, peaks and valleys of PVC resin prices and start again. As for the weather, you only ever noticed it when it interfered with sales and as regards the bright future, yes, I think self-belief and belief in the key team players made that a given.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was standing in a factory floor empty except for a shiny new Battenfeld extruder. It was sitting there together with a few Tonne bags of trial material and with workmen starting to instal basic equipment. It has been a long but never tedious journey to our current set up where we have 21 extruders and several injection moulding machines on 2 strategically located sites. Long on the calendar but so so rapid in the passing. In the meantime we have seen our competitors dwindle in number from 13 or 14 to just 3 significant players left in our particular ‘route to market’.
Most competitors fell away or were taken over or needed to be financially re-engineered arising from failed gambles that low prices would drive volumes to economic levels. It would seem that they did not have a true handle on their real costs and paid the price. This has been replicated up and down the chain from resin producers through compounders down to stockists and installers.
There has been very little innovation in new product types or applications but considerable variety introduced to profile shapes. The rare exception has been that over the last few years we have seen a continuing growth in demand for colour whether as a skin colour or a foil.
I would guess that the failure by the market in general to generate greater innovation and speculative products relates to the very poor return on investment through the years allied to the high maintenance and capital cost of equipment.
That was then, this is now. Here we are right in the middle of an economic storm. My view is: “so what’s new”. Same problems, same issues, but we go forward, glass half full, looking for the opportunities created by fortune or left by our competitors. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
