It’s a Small(er) World

For the past eight months or so, I’ve seen the U.S. stone market downshift rapidly as credit and customers became harder and harder to find. It’s only natural to wonder if conditions are the same in similar markets, where the emphasis remains on consumption rather than quarrying and machine production.
Stone+tec, the biennial European show, seemed to be the first place where fabricators would likely outnumber importers and suppliers. And the side attractions of good beer, hearty Bavarian food and oddly addicting German TV afternoon courtroom dramas are hard to resist.
The verdict on the stone show, meanwhile, is mixed. Yes, things are slower here in the trade, and it’s easy to see from walking the show floor and talking to exhibitors. The pace, however, hasn’t dropped as much as the United States.
In many ways, Stone+tec is the prototype of the ideal stone show. The host city, Nuremberg, is centrally located and reasonably easy to reach for most of its targeted market (central and eastern Europe) via air, car or rail. There’s plenty of close-in parking at the exhibition center, and there’s a specific trade-fair stop on the city’s subway.
Nuremberg’s also a mid-sized city with museums, old historic churches and a mix of industry. It’s an appealing, real-world place.
Stone+tec’s organizers also straddle the show around a German national holiday that occurs on a Thursday. The result is a guarantee of at least one busy day of packed exhibition halls, as thousands of stone-shop owners take a busman’s holiday.
It quickly became apparent, though that more people took this year’s holiday to head for the lakes, or the mountains, or somewhere other than Stone+tec. Even with the holiday crowd, the show’s attendance came in at 34,000, a 17-percent drop from the last edition in 2007.
Not that you’d notice, unless you’ve been to several of the events. Exhibit space and booth layouts helped to minimize empty space, and construction near the show’s former main entrance allowed a reconfiguration that swapped out one large hall for a smaller space.
European shows tend to be events of habit, where an exhibitor places a booth in the same hall and the same space. That’s where you really noticed the change this time; some large exhibitors appeared in the same hall, but a smaller space. Some didn’t show up at all.
If the smaller booth/no booth experience sounds familiar – as in the 2009 edition of Coverings in April – that’s not far off the mark. And the same for the drop in attendance, although Nuremberg’s eight smaller exhibit halls mask the effect better than Chicago’s cavernous McCormick Place.
And the reason for the fall-off in both places? It doesn’t take long to realize that it’s mainly due to us – as in the U.S. market.
Nobody from stateside offered a booth in Nuremberg, but the U.S. exhibitor contingent at foreign shows is always low. In the stone industry, we’re a nation of consumers, not producers, and that’s making its mark in the trade beyond our boundaries.
Stone+tec favors the machinery and tooling market a bit more than stone, and it’s readily apparent that this is time to retrench, not expand. European-based manufacturers know all about the glut of used equipment on the U.S. market, and nobody’s looking to push a huge amount of new machines and models.
Yes, the current recession is making things tough in the international stone trade. But it’s worth remembering that the previous economic dip in the early 2000s barely caused a slight drop in the U.S. stone market for a couple of quarters – the third and fourth of 2001 – before jumping back into double-digit annual growth. Likes the old Doritos slogan, the United States crunched all it wanted, and the world made more.
European-based manufacturers and suppliers eventually found less business in the United States during the mid-2000s because of the strengthening euro vs. the U.S. dollar, but that argument – along with the €1=$1.50 rate, wasn’t advanced much at Nuremberg. Now, it’s a new kind of awareness; instead of jawing about currency exchange, I spent more time explaining the nuances of U.S. bankruptcy laws.
The one thing I didn’t see or hear was anyone bidding good riddance to any U.S. influence. Instead, it’s more of Yankee Get Well; there’s genuine concern that the U.S. stone market improve. The main concern is just how much longer it’s going to take. We’re buyers, not sellers, in the world stone market, and people want to see us back in the game, whether we’re dealing directly with them or not.
Of course, they’d also like to see other players regain form; Spain, for example, took the downturn much harder than Germany (or the booming economy of, as it turns out, Poland), and moneyed hot spots like Dubai have cooled off. One international stone editor, K. Vikram, noted that construction cranes in Dubai were absent or still during a recent visit.
That’s one thing to say for Germany – the cranes are still flying, with renovations and new construction continuing in Nuremberg and other cities like Munich. Like the vendors at Stone+tec, the German economy seems to be holdings its own.
You can tell, though, that we’re needed. If you wish our economic recovery would pick up the pace … well, you’ll find plenty of the same across the Atlantic.
Emerson Schwartzkopf can be reached at emerson@stonebusiness.net. His blog can be found at here at Stone Business Online and at stonebusinesseditor.wordpress.com, where you’ll find out more about Bavarian food and German TV this month.