Maintaining the trajectory for innovation and growth

20 February, 2023

“Total running costs over the last ten years for a 160-kW compressor have more than doubled. Put simply, for every £100,000 spent on compressed air previously, around £82,000 of this was the energy costs. Now, this figure has risen to £91,000 – with energy costs doubling in the past two years alone. The good news is there are numerous high performing, energy-efficient compressors available on the market, which can help reduce a site’s reliance on electricity considerably.”

Stephen Wright, managing director, Thorite, reflects that everything over the past year has been caught up with endless rounds of price increases and supply chain issues. “What are the causes? One would respond ‘all of the above’,” he says. “Whilst there are still impacts from Brexit, most of the issues are built around the supply difficulties associated with coming out of COVID, especially anything involving China, and the effect of the Ukraine war. It’s a bit like a leaky bucket – you fix one leak, and another leak starts. Lead times have gone up dramatically and we are being quoted six, nine and even 12 months on some products. It feels like we’re going back to the dark ages of the 60s and 70s! I think the whole sector is focused on fixing this, but the target continues to move.”

Semiconductor shortage

From the perspective of Steve Schofield, director and chief executive, British Pump Manufacturers’ Association (BPMA), there are many challenges in play today, from skill shortages to the ever-increasing price of energy. “However, the COVID pandemic broke down long-standing supply chains and has caused huge shortages of various materials and components used in the manufacture of pumps and their related equipment,” he says. “This is particularly evident in the global shortage of semiconductor chips, which are frequently used nowadays in the electrical components that control pumps. Prices have risen across all sectors and after many years of stagnant or reducing price levels we are finding many of our members are having to increase prices. In some cases, we’ve even witnessed several price-rises within a 12-month period, due to the ongoing increase in component parts.”

Schofield adds that importing and exporting has proven a challenge for many BPMA members with increased costs and bureaucracy. “On the horizon is the change from CE Marking to UKCA Marking, but eventually we see the UK Government diverging all regulation relating to our industry in order to have their own set of UK-centric safety and technical regulations,” he says. “If this does happen, pumps that are sold to the UK market will need to meet different regulation, testing and safety standards to those of the European market. Quite simply, this will add another level of business complexity to an already heavily regulated sector, the benefits or which are hard to fathom.”

One of the ongoing issues in Brussels concerns water pumps. “This is legislation that we’ve been pushing for many years,” says Schofield. “The Consultation Forum on water pumps was back in 2019 but because of COVID the outcome has been delayed. However, potentially we could be looking at saving 35 to 40 TW of electricity by introducing this. We’ve been part of it for such a long time and we want the UK to do what Europe is doing.”

As Schofield explains, BPMA members supply pumps for all sectors that require the movement of liquids from A to B, which means that something that is a trend in one sector might not be in another. “However, one trend, or rather issue, that we are dealing with in the domestic sector, and which has been accentuated by the global shortage of semiconductors, is the supply of noncompliant circulator pumps,” he points out. “Manufacturers across Europe are struggling to hit their usual production quotas, with lead times becoming increasingly longer, and, as a result, wholesalers are turning to cheap noncompliant circulators supplied from the far east to meet the market demands. The BPMA is working hard to try and stop this through its relationship with the Market Surveillance authorities.”