Industrial Supplier Business Strategy Options Employed During Downturn

We have a Process Level and Inventory Tank Gauging (ITG) supplier strategy survey that is still open for more participation but, even so, we took a few moments to tabulate the preliminary results and send them to our sponsors last month.One of the questions centered on what companies did during 2009 - 2010.

When the downturn started at the end of 2008 it was clear by the start 0f 2009 it was going to be long and ugly. Leaving out the Mil/Aero segments, most suppliers were left with several likely business levers they could select including outsourcing, downsizing, and reorganizing. I was a bit surprised when I saw that ~65% of the survey respondents indicated doing no such thing.

I was a little surprised by this until I remembered a key difference. Although publicly traded companies are under pressure to maintain profitability in the short term, a good portion of industrial process product suppliers are privately held. This is particularly true for many sensing companies. Being privately held, can allow many of these companies to take the longer business view and avoid the drastic cost cutting measures that can hold them back during recovery cycles. That is of course assuming they have enough cash flow and reserves to survive. In some cases, these well positioned but potentially low on cash entities can be attractive nuggets for larger conglomerates and some of them could be scooped up which could be the case for machine safety equipment supplier Jacob Safety which was recently acquired by ABB group.

Would you like to see more of the results from our survey? If you are a supplier of process level and/or ITG products there are 2 options. You can purchase some volumes from the report, or you can take the short 5-10 minute survey at the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5DFMYXJ

We are also offering you 1 chance in our iPad raffle for completing the survey. If you have already taken the survey, please stand by for the aggregated results which we will send you in 3Q. We will also alert the winner at that time.