Karl has been involved in the business to business information service since 1990. Having spent time with information to the construction and manufacturing industry in the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and the US.
- The Index is split into three processes - Machining, Fabrication, and Others.
- 2023’s data for Quarter 2 is collected from 192 companies and 313 projects.
- Quarter 2's Index decreased by 34% against the preceding quarter.
- All three sub indexes decreased against the previous quarter.
Overall, a very slow quarter with all three indexes decreasing against last quarter. Obviously, three bank holidays in May has an effect but there are less new projects from larger manufacturers and slight less activity from buyers.
Quoting activity from suppliers has gone up this quarter showing suppliers are working hard to win new business.
Machining
- 57% of first quarter projects were for machining process
- The buyers of machining process has a total outsourcing value of £16,148,820 and decrease of 12% from previous quarter
Machining had steady decline of the quarter with June being the lowest for several years in both value and number of projects.
Fabrication
- 34% of first quarter projects were for fabrication process
- The buyers of machining process has a total outsourcing value of £13,255,227 and decrease of 52% from previous quarter
Fabrication had the larges decrease of all process this quarter, a small decrease in numbers but more than 50% in size of companies outsourcing values.
Other
- 9% of first quarter projects were for other process
- The buyers of machining process has a total outsourcing value of £3,396,433 and decrease of 9% from previous quarter
Not such large fall in values and it was only June which was down. Number of projects were very similar if anything slightly higher.
Industry
As usual Industrial Machinery is the largest sector but with a much smaller margin than before. Marine and Construction had a much larger percentage than usual while other sectors were their usual sizes.
About the Contract Manufacturing Index
The Contract Manufacturing Index (CMI) has been developed to reflect the total purchasing budget of companies that are looking to outsource manufacturing in any given month.
This reflects a sample of over 4,000 companies, who have a purchasing budget of more than £3bn and a supplier base sample of over 7,000 vendors, with a verified turnover in excess of £25bn.
We measure this by extracting data from the projects we receive from manufacturing purchasers who have an active need for the services of subcontract engineering suppliers.
Since 2016, we have published the index quarterly and this report is a summary of our findings for the 1st quarter of 2023. In order to shed more light on the emerging trends, we have also broken this down by process and industry.