Marble Industry in Pandemic has faced many ups and downs as all the other sectors. Its most important and visible effect was that the fairs could not be held and customer visits were either completely over or reduced to a very small extent. Apart from travel bans, no one wanted or couldn’t travel, except for compulsory situations. Of course, this situation had positive effects on the trader firms. When the bosses or representatives of the firms abroad could not travel, the intermediary / trader firms which they knew and trusted became their eyes and ears and they reassured the importer companies by handling most of their business in Turkey.
When curfews in the country were added to all these travel restrictions, the production amount and sales of many companies all over the world decreased. In this period importer companies generally preferred to purchase only for their projects or urgent customer demands, they did not want to keep too much stock. Some countries stopped their purchases completely; the countries that did not stop but continued their purchases were Middle Eastern countries, USA, South American countries, North African countries etc…
Shortage Of Container in the Marble Industry in Pandemic
It was very difficult to find containers which would go to these countries, the shortage in containers and rise in freight rates left the exporters in a very difficult situation. Container shortages are still being experienced. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that China collects containers and wants to control world trade. According to other comments, they may prefer to deliver the containers to the regions where the container prices are expensive and the returns are faster, since the profitability increases in this period they do not want to reduce the freight rates.
In such a difficult period, the goods you sell cannot be loaded for a few months means that the arrival of Money is delayed and stocks swell and your return speed slows down.
Freights o the other hand increased 3-4 times possibly due to the lack of containers. For example freight rates that used to be around 500-900 dollars increased to around 1800 to 3000 dollars which added an extra cost of 4 to 6 dollars per m2. In this case, many of the customers to find the balance in this price increase by asking the manufacturers for discounts, whereasit was not easy to reduce the prices due to the increase in costs even if the Exchange rates increased in the domestic market.
In addition to all these the unofficial embargo imposed by Saudi Arabia on Turkish marble has left many intermediaries and manufacturers focused on that region in a difficult situation, the stocks of some manufacturers have swelled, the containers of many exporters sending goods to Saudi Arabia were kept in Saudi Arabian ports, the companies suffered great losses.
The Turkish marble exporter, who experienced some impasses during the pandemic period managed to overcome all these difficult conditions. The exporter has been working day and night in order to close the gap with the marbe demand that has increased in the last few months. Marble producers accustomed to fighting hard with natural conditions, managed to overcome these difficult conditions too. Even though the container shortage continues, it started to soften a bit during the summer months which boosted everyones morale.
I wanted to make a brief summary of the marble industry in pandemic. I hope all the problems will be solved as soo as possible and at the end of pandemic, we can meet at the fairs as usual, we can discuss the sector face to face and make good big sales. Until next meeting, let’s be in touch
With warm regards,