To cut a long story short, the primary problem is a shortage of fluorospar. Add to that, a major manufacturer of PTFE polymer has had a serious fire, shutting the plant down for an extended period whilst another has transfered production to another material. Other plants have had difficulties too. The effects are being talked about as a "perfect storm".
The Chinese producers who have held the price down for about the last 10 years have taken this shortage as an opportunity to raise prices.
The problems are widely known about in the industry but the end users have only recently started to feel it, not understanding why items that were ex stock are now on 10-12 weeks lead time.
The smart buyers are buying ahead of requirement as the lead times are getting extended but that makes matters worse for everyone else.
It's not like it's the end of the world but I feel this could be the start of something much bigger. Even some of the big players are sticking their head in the sand which is the worse thing to do under these circumstances.
For a lot of applications, you can use alternative materials but in applications such as even automotive, to get the go ahead to change material takes a lot of development time. In aerospace - you may as well forget it.
Our company suplies one item for a very important aerospace application which costs us about £10 to make but without it - the plane cannot fly. They could redesign the component using another material but the length of time to do this and complete would bring production to a standstill for a long time. 18 months ago nobody would have forseen a shortage in such a basic comodity as PTFE.
Most people think of PTFE as in plumbers tape which is made from PTFE scrap. There will be no problems there if the scrap availability reduces. It is the high end critical applications where modern technology will suffer.
I could go on but I think I already have.
Time will tell where this leads.
