Supply Update – December 2021

 By Tony Sullivan             

Purchasing Director for Fox Trading 

As we will all know from the daily news bulletins, the global supply chain continues to come under immense pressure and there seems to be no industry or sector that can escape the macro factors of increasing consumer demand and shortages in supply of products, raw material, and labour which, in turn, is resulting with inflation at levels not seen for over 10 years. Plus, the recent and very significant increases in wholesale energy costs is fast moving through the manufacturing process and will be impacting on final product pricing.   

At Fox we are working tirelessly to try and mitigate the worst of these product supply issues to protect our customers’ service levels as much as possible.

Our Purchasing team are using a variety of sourcing strategies including collecting stock ourselves from our UK suppliers due to the lack of hauliers, widening our supply base to secure new sources of supply and offering suitable alternative products to customers where the original product is simply not available.

We have also built extra stock holding, where possible, in our local Channel Islands warehouses so that we are best placed to respond to changing customer demand.

And we are placing advanced orders into 2022 on selected product to reserve stock for Fox Customer’s, that is en route to the UK from the Far East.

 

View the ITV report and interview with Tony here 

Our September update is still very relevant to help understand the current supply status. The situation will remain a global issue for some months to come and therefore we do anticipate service levels continuing to be impacted, despite the action outlined above. During this time, it will be very helpful if our customers are also able to review their own volume requirements and try and plan ahead, as ‘Just in Time’ ordering and delivery isn’t going to prove very effective in the medium term.

We would like to advise all our valued customers of current supply position and to reassure that we are taking proactive measures behind the scenes to try and mitigate the impact on product availability for both- customer businesses and ours. Unfortunately, we do not see the situation improving before the Spring of 2022 and so it will be important for us to communicate with individual customers to ensure we are supporting them as much as we possibly can. The Fox Sales Team will continue to work with them to find suitable alternatives where available and we thank all customers in advance for being as flexible and understanding as possible.

We will continue to communicate on this subject as the situation develops and we will include any relevant detail on individual subcategories or products that would be of interest to the majority of our customers.

With any questions or comments we advise to contact Fox Account Managers in the first instance.

Cargo Port

Cargo ship in Rotterdam Port

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