On March 30, 2022, China Aggregates Association had a staff meeting, in which president Hu Youyi delivered a speech about the current economic situation at home and abroad and the development situation of Chinese aggregates industry.
Hu Youyi pointed out that the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, causing the restructuring of the global industrial supply chain, and impacting our industry to some extent. Aggregate is the largest, indispensable and irreplaceable raw material for infrastructure construction. However, Chinese real estate industry, which has a large demand for aggregates, has a rough start in 2022. The sales area was 157.03 million square meters, a year-on-year decrease of 9.6%; the sales of commercial housing was 1,545.9 billion yuan, a decrease of 19.3%.
Hu Youyi emphasized that since the beginning of this year, the volume and price of aggregates in some areas have fallen, and some companies have encountered difficulties in production and operation; the bidding price for aggregates mining rights in many places have continued to rise, and there are concerns about overcapacity in some areas... All CAA staff should keep abreast of the latest industry situation and do a great job in publicity, guidance and membership service.
Faced with the new problems in the aggregates industry under the new situation, what should we do? Hu Youyi, president of China Aggregates Associrion and Meng Hua from the Department of Information of CAA wrote an article sorting out and analyzing the recent development priorities of the industry and the promotion of green, low-carbon, safe and high-quality development of our industry.
The full text of the article is as follows:
Based on service-oriented thinking, exploring industrial business opportunities
Issues have risen in the industry in recent years. The premium of the aggregates mining rights auction reached 30 to 50 times. The giants outside the industry are rushing for aggregates market. The production line has reached an output of 300 tons to 500 tons or even thousands of tons per hour. The price of regional aggregates products continues to rise. The market is quite hot in recent years. According to the law of industrial development, the transformation, upgrading, growth and expansion of a industry has a process and certain limits. After the market heat is gone, everything will return to normal. We need to take precautions and think what we need to focus after the heat pass? From now on, what aspects should we start from to promote and maintain the green, low-carbon, safe and high-quality development of the industry?
In the future market competition, those who win the service will win the market! After several years of accelerated development of China’s aggregates industry, the quality and performance of equipment and aggregates products have been recognized by the market. The core of future enterprise improvement is in-depth service - creating value for users.
On the one hand is the pre-sales service. Equipment manufacturing enterprises should design and provide different types of equipment that meet the corresponding standards according to the characteristics of different types of rocks for customers, and provide customized services to customers. Aggregates production enterprises should make targeted recommendations to customers on the indicators of the products and the characteristics of parent rock according to the engineering projects served by concrete or construction enterprises. Because different manufactured sand and crushed stone have different properties, different methods of use, and different application fields, the final evaluation criteria are also different. Communication and notification in advance will avoid a lot of unnecessary troubles for customers, thereby increasing the service value.
Another aspect is after-sales service. In the market environment of product homogeneity, the focus of enterprise competition is after-sales service. The after-sales service need to be provided to the customer’s production and construction front line. Based on the customer's production and construction plan, they need to regularly maintain the equipment, provide the spare parts that need to be replaced in time, inform the customer in advance to matters need attention of the use of equipment, and solve the problems with customers in the application process, etc., to ensure the continuous production and construction. Companies in the international market should have a deep understanding of this aspect. Some customers will give up products that have finally entered the international market after using them for a period of time. The main reason is that the after-sales service of the company has not kept up. For enterprises involved in the international market, it is particularly important to achieve localized services. Only by recognizing the importance of in-depth service, implementing it carefully and thoughtfully in action, and eliminating the worries of customers, can they maintain the business for a long time.
We can extend the idea in terms of services. Recently, a company consulted CAA on supply source of sand powder. The sand powder they need is a by-product with a particle size of 75 to 150 nanometers produced in the aggregates production process. After sieving, the sand powder and other powder are mixed together, making it difficult to separate. Aggregates production enterprises generally discard the kind of powder. However, this level of sand powder is an indispensable raw material for the production of tile adhesives, floor materials, putty, waterproof materials, dry-mixed mortar, wet-mixed mortar, etc. Among the above materials, the amount of sand powder can account for 65%.But in general, the amount of this kind of sand powder is not large, and the total annual market demand is about 20 million tons.
In the past, the source of sand powder was from extraction of river sand. When the mining of natural sand and gravel in riverbed was not forbidden, the market supply of this grade of sand powder was relatively sufficient. In recent years, with the continuous advancement of ecological civilization construction, the state has imposed restrictions on river sand mining and set restrictions such as the exploitable period, exploitable area, exploitable range, and exploitable amount. River sand miningare are not allowed in many areas. If there is a violation, heavy penalties will be imposed (the restrictions on sand mining in rivers will become more and more strict in the future), and the market supply of this sand powder is in short supply. At present, the main product of aggregates manufacturers is crushed stone and manufactured sand. Compared with the output of hundreds or even thousands of tons of crushed stone and manufactured sand per hour, the market demand of 20 million tons of sand powder per year is too small, and it needs specially installed or modified equipment. Therefore, it is very uneconomic, and enterprises are not willing to produce this kind of sand powder, which caused the situation that the price of sand powder has been rising all the way in recent years, and in the past two years, the market is out of stock of this kind of product.
It can be seen from the above analysis that this kind of sand powder is currently a rigid demand in the market. From the perspective of serving market, aggregates producers could have some discussions in this regard, and maybe figure out a solution to the problem.