Stats updated

I have updated the TubeNet Statistics. Please take a look at: STATS. The trend is growing as it has been all the time. I expect that summer brings some lower figures and fall makes them to increase again.

What is happening to Europe?

I was watching from the TV about the meeting of Industry and Political leaders meeting that took a place in Helsinki today (July 8:th 2005) when they were discussing about economical development in Europe.

It seems that there is needed some hard actions to be made on a political level to avoid 4-5 years stagnation period. This was stated by several of speakers. What the actions are, is hard guestion. We all know that Europoean Union is based of number of countries that have their own individual needs and preferences. To be frank, I find it difficult fo find out a single program that would satisfy everyone.

Some American analysts gave good comments. They mentioned that the same situation as in USA at the time when President Reagan started. He was able to create positive feeling by cutting taxes for example and - thus - creating happy attitude among people.

The problem still remains that to carry out such a big political changes within European Union is difficult. Just as Mr. Aho mentioned, there is needed a kind of crice to make it easier to do such a big changes. What the crice is, remains unkown. In Finland for example, the crice was liberation of banking sectos in eraly 1990's. It shook the country to the crice that was enormous. This crice was forced the politicians to make strong moves.

Such a big moves were not good for the political carear. Mr. Aho lost his place of prime minister in Finland, but he did the necessary. I wonder - now when we all know the transfering of industrial production to China, Russia and East European countries - do we really need such a crice in European Union to make desisions for better economy?

Perhaps we need and perhaps we have one in our hands already? Who knows?

I am optimistic though, and trust that meetings like this one is noticed by politicians. Instead of thinking about the next election results, they should really put their effort to make things seriously better. This may cost their continuation of political corear, but they can make some unforgetable history, just like Mr. Aho did in Finland.

Our Industry thoughts Some words about machinery sales within tube and pipe industries.

Tube production is doing pretty much okay. Especially stainless steel prices are still high and demand keeps going hard especially in China. But machinery sales are not doing that good. Not at all. Especially thinking about countries that used to be on the top of machine manufacturing and sales. Today they are struggling more or less. Why is that?

My thinking is that China has made a huge change for all of this. Once production is being transferred to China, it seems to be difficult to find need for machinery investments. Machines are often found to be too expensive to justify investment. Of course the reason for this is low cost labor.

The second matter is that the East European countries and Russia can also produce cheaper than the West European countries have used to. The result has been like with China: Production has been transferred - and is still transferring - to east. Somehow this has also changed the world of machinery investments within European tube industry.

Of course everybody tries to figure out cheaper manufacturing ways, which - of course - is benchmarking machine manufacturers. The way I see this, is that for machine manufacturers it will be more difficult to survive if the machine is a kind of "universal". The cases that I have gone through during last years have shown that when product is made clearly to special purpose where it does the job extremely well, it has been successful. Therefore, if you - as a machine manufacturer - think that your business segment seems to be well defined at the moment, it is worth thinking to shrink it even more.

Cheers my friends

Juha