Commodities Survey: How Companies are Reacting to Rising Costs

Industrial manufacturers are facing significant challenges due to the increasing prices of input factors. Our recent study shows that construction materials, chemicals, and base materials companies are not implementing price increases on a large enough scale to compensate for this lasting instability.

Prices of raw materials such as steel, wood, silicone products, acrylates, and resins have strongly increased since the start of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. In the last six months alone, prices have gone up 50 to 100 percent. We recently conducted a study, which revealed that manufacturing companies attribute this primarily to a sharp rise in demand, stockpiling effects, and production capacities that have not yet been fully ramped up.

These price increases pose major challenges for companies in the construction, chemicals, and materials industries — and experts aren’t hopeful the situation will resolve itself quickly. Half of participants don’t…