Editor's Message - Industry thoughts, Statistics and New traffic record Industry News - TPAs Extruding, Drawing, and Tube Reducing Roundtable Product News - Thermatool: First Alpha TRC-3008 Dieset Technical Articles - Körner: New developments in tube pretreatment plants Tube and Pipe People - Maillefer and Conenor into a strategic partnership New TubeNet Members & Renewals - Anupam Metals

About TubeNet Newsletter

It has been a long time since the last TubeNet Newsletter was sent. I have been concentrating mainly to improve TubeNet register. This time the Newsletter is on this PDF-format which - I hope - will make it easier to read. Before the Newsletter was html-based email message, which didn't work properly with all email programs. PDF-format secures that the Newsletter is the same everywhere.

What is happening with EU? Why Referendum

It may be hard words to put on-line, but I will say what I think. I feel that with some countries EU politicians doesn't have enough "balls" to make decisions. Instead they go for a referendum to ask from from people like in France and in the Netherlands. In my mind this will not do any good for the EU. We have seen it already. To me this only sounds that in those cases politicians do not have enough guts to make decisions. Why I said so?

In all EU countries there is so called democracy and parlamentarism. People are voting for the best candidates to make decisions for their behalf. At that time everybody thinks that those selected politicians are representing people who should have better understanding about happenings within political environment than ordinary people. Right? Isin't this what they try to say during elections?

Then comes this kind of harder desicion to make: Constitution of EU. What happends? These selected politicians are throwing the ball back to people to make decision by voting. A Referendum. Question: Why do we elect people in the first place if they are afraid to make the most important decisions? Ordinary people - like me - who don't have interest to follow every aspect within political environment - have given a mandate during elections to the politicians to make decisions fro our behalf. Now they are afraid. In my mind - this sucks.

Statistics updated - New records at TubeNet

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.

A new traffic record was made during March 2005. Over 70000 visitors who made over one million hits. This is remarkable figure considering that Tube and Pipe sector is quite narrow. I can still remember well the in the beginning 10 years ago when it was nice to notice first 500 monthly visitors. Today this figure is 140 times more.

Industry thoughts

Some words about machinery sales within tube and pipe industries.

Tube production is doing pretty much okay. Steel prices have gone down, but they still remains in a good level. 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.

Despite all of this, have a nice summer.

Cheers!

Juha Haapala