Martin Cossington, of Universal Wood Products Ltd, has been in the timber trader for over 40 years
Well again we seem to be chasing our own tails down the rabbit hole of low prices and reduced margins.
It is true to say that we all are guilty in some respects of following the leader on prices.
For a small manufacturer like UWP, we tend to be the last to man the lifeboats and are little protected in these moves on pricing. It is obvious that increases by the MDF producers will not be long in coming and fully justified when one considers log, resin and labour costs. True to say that power contracts have reduced by a third, but we are still all paying twice as much as were two years ago.
Prices will we expect start to rise the moment we can all see a significant increase in demand. I wouldn’t like to say that we can see that just yet, but our architect and contractor markets all seem to be very busy emailing us with projected requirements.
Someone’s got to push the green button on these sometime soon and similar for the larger producers of MDF and Timber mouldings that need the major house developers to push forward with fallowed housing sites. We shall need a little more help from Mr Bailey in this endeavour – 4 % base rate by January? I might be a little too hopeful.
Our merchant customers seem to find us when a site manager has just realised, they have run out of skirting, so happy to pull that rabbit out of our hat on these occasions. Our merchant customers started the year fairly well with a good order book placed by February, then unfortunately things went very quiet.
Our merchant customers then reported that they were sitting on significant stocks of timber, panel products and mouldings.
It was during this period that we saw a significant fall in demand, and we were rather concerned. However, orders have picked up a little since from our merchant distributors.
New product specifications have also been placed in our offer as standard stock including a 350mm wide window board to meet the latest building regulations for cavity walls. Also, Grooved Skirting and Architrave specifications and a very popular panel mould profile for interior decoration.
Our specialist architect / specifier led customer chain of supply requiring that extra level of attention and logistic support is popular for the more demanding requirements, although we are always happy to forward leads to our timber sector producers when MDF simply won’t be viable to produce a certain pattern. We continue to offer a flexible made to order service that’s aimed at this design led sector.
There does appear to be an underlying confidence that markets will improve, and we just need to be patient. I must admit I’m not the most patient of people, but we’ve all been here before and let keep our chins up and forge ahead.
A long-standing friend in the trade put it well – “Well it’s a good thing to have a little war chest in these times but we don’t need too many battles.”
