Air of uncertainty
December 01st 2009

As 2009 draws to a close, Chris Dee, executive director of BCAS, talks to Val Vealey, editor of air user and looks back on a turbulent year and considers what 2010 may have in store for those in the compressed air industry.

At the beginning of the year as the recession and the economic situation started to unfold we saw clearly how quickly the industry was declining. There were all sorts of thoughts and fears as to how bad this was going to go. We’ve now got to November and, in fact, it’s not as bad as we thought it might have been at the beginning of the year.

But, being in contact with a lot of the members and asking them about their plans for next year, what has come across quite clearly is that they’ve survived 2009 on the order book of 2008, and even 2007, because some of their projects go on for a couple of years. So our concerns really are for 2010. If you thought 2009 was difficult for the compressed air industry, we think that 2010 will be even more challenging.

A lot of companies have put off both purchasing new equipment and also maintaining their existing equipment. However, we have seen some successes within the compressed air industry where they’ve started to make use of some of the initiatives such as the Carbon Trust’s interest-free loan and there have already been some significant loans of £300,000 to £400,000, and I’ve just heard of another one that’s another £300,000 interest-free loan to allow the customer to buy new equipment immediately.

So we see the challenges for 2010 being to ensure that the end users are fully aware of all the opportunities that they have for maintaining and improving their compressed air system – whether that means buying new equipment or not, but equally the cost of not maintaining their compressed air system.

A lot of manufacturers are so focused on just keeping their factory unit running that as long as the compressed air system is ticking over, it’s not on the agenda of problems, but of course if it does stop then it does cause even more problems for them in an already difficult situation.

Interestingly, I attended a European meeting a couple of weeks ago and even though we’ve heard of some of the European countries coming out of the economic recession, within the compressed air world across Europe they’re finding exactly the same challenges even now and mainland Europe are still seeing that 2010 is going to be a difficult year.

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