Fibreglass Material Price Increases
As the roofing and building industry slowly recovers from the covid pandemic the impact on prices for the GRP roofing market continues to be extremely volatile with suppliers issuing price increases across the board and with more to come into 2022.
The reasons for this is demand has out stripped capacity and reduction in capacity by all the major producers, along with demand from the USA and China further exacerbating the market.
The ongoing energy crisis has also had an effect on prices and shipping costs have gone through the roof which has severely affected the whole GRP supply chain.
According to Steve Bowen, managing director at Strandek, a fibreglass roofing and lining specialist, “companies like Built GRP, a supplier of fibreglass roofing systems, are being restricted to how much they can purchase and are only being allowed materials on a strict allocation basis which has a knock on effect for the end user. There is also a shortage of some raw materials essential to the GRP industry again heavily impacting prices.”
“Most companies within the GRP industries were hoping that towards the end of 2021 that prices would stabilize but unfortunately this has not happened and there is already evidence that prices will in increase even further way into 2022.”
“We can but hope that these continuous price increases will somehow curtail and bring about some much needed relief to the whole GRP sector.”
According to Paul Chapman of Resin Library, ingredients used for fibreglass composites and fibreglass repair kits will be subject to price increases in the coming months.
For glass fibre reinforcement, manufacturers such as Owens Corning, increases in price are expected to be 15% from the late Q4/early Q1 2022.
For polyester resin, again a similar situation is expected to the reinforcement during 2021. Increases are expected on a regular basis. This is again attributed to energy and transport costs which have been a big driver in the increased prices of polyester, also increased pressure on raw material costs and restricted supplies such as styrene, glycols and maleic. In conjunction to this we have also seen shortages in fumed silica and titanium dioxide.
Market price increases of £0.12/kg began in 2021 on all polyesters and further increases of up to £0.20/kg are expected for 1st Jan 2022. The same trend is observed for catalyst, which will see another 13% from the 1st of January and all ancillaries will increase by 10% from the 1st January.
This will impact the costs associated with a range of structures, from fibreglass yachts to GRP bund linings.