Industry situation after Iraq war

It is May already and the Iraq war over - at least according to President Bush. Unfortunately the slow time that came along the war seems to continue within Tube and Pipe industry. The first three months of the year were good - especially in USA - but now when the war supposed to be over, it seems that everyone is just waiting to see if things are really settled.

Of course there can be also some other reasons than the war for this slowness, but the fact is that manufacturing has been slugging, companies are concerned about all kind of spending and American workers are still losing jobs because of excess capacity and higher productivity.

It doesn't go too good in Germany either. According to country's top economic institutes the German economy will be probaly grow only 0.5% this year and 1.8% next year, with the public sector deficit reaching 3.4% of gross domestic product this year and 2.9% next year. The unemployment rate may reach as high as 10.4% this year. Investments are suspended and my guess is that nothing will happen before fall comes. Perhaps not even then.

SARS

As if the Iraq war wouldn't be enough, then came this SARS problem. It is hitting especially hard to the airline and tourism industries, but naturally everyone is concerned about it - globally. Of course the worst situation remains within East Asia. According to World Bank the economic growth within East Asia's will slow by about one percentage point from last year's as SARS cuts tourism and hurts commerce.

So, there is lots of uncertainty in the world now and it effects to the Tube and Pipe Industry also. I wish I would have the crystal ball to see how long we still need to wait before the better times will return.

The positive matter that I have seen is that the traffic at TubeNet has been pretty good despite of these world wide problems and the rate of inquiries keeps high as normal.

Cheers,
Juha