RESHORING
US industrial production is currently quite strong and certain indicators suggest continued strength moving forward.
economic outlook”, adding that overhead crane and hoist suppliers will need to remain flexible as their customers balance their immediate productivity needs against longer term capital investment decisions.
US indicators still strong US manufacturing activity in general tends to ebb and flow somewhat and vary by certain end use sectors, but Ronald Piso, sales manager for GW Becker, says that overall domestic manufacturing activity has been generally flat to moderately growing, remaining fairly strong despite certain challenges, notably certain labour and supply chain issues.
In fact, Harry Moser, founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative, points out that not only is US industrial production – particularly for durable goods – currently quite strong, but certain forward-looking indicators point to continued strength. For example, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) has not only been expansionary (over 50%) for the past seven months, but its 55.6% level in July was its highest reading since May 2022. Moser pointed out that the recent manufacturing construction boom has been
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dramatically helped certain legislation that had originally been passed under the Biden administration including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and CHIPS & Science Act, as well as by the Trump administration’s import tariffs. There, however, has been a bit of volatility over the past decades when it comes to US manufacturing activity, Rosemary Coates, executive director of the Reshoring Institute, says, observing that while the US was a manufacturing powerhouse in the 1960s, slowly, over time, a lot of production was offshored.
However, all the China bashing over the year
sparked a flurry of conversations about whether more products could once again be produced in the US. Coates says that while it was very gradual, by 2020 the momentum for reshoring of manufacturing started to grow. Coates says that one of the factors was the impact that Covid-related shortages had upon manufacturers’ ability to get the materials and parts that they needed to produce their products. She said that helped many OEMs understand the risk of having long global supply chains and made them seriously consider bringing more manufacturing back to the US – whether for finished products or the materials, parts and components that are used to make those products.
But while he says that he expecting that the
reshoring of manufacturing will be an important trend – and one that will continue to have a very positive impact upon the US overhead crane and hoist market – Duhamel says it is hard to say just how much has occurred or is likely to occur going forward given that the rate varies by the reshoring of greenfield projects, retrofits of manufacturing at existing facilities and by different manufacturing sectors. Also, it means different things to different people. For example, GW Becker’s Piso maintains that, at least at the current time, reshoring is more of a buzzword than it is what he would call a big trend. That, he says, is because not only does it take time for a company to build a new production plant but it takes another several years for that facility to start manufacturing and selling its products.
In the meantime, Piso says that US manufacturers – including overhead crane and hoist producers – are currently making plans to prepare for when reshoring has a more profound impact upon the market.
Divining the future That is not to say that there have not been any predictions. For example, Moser says that he
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