The Government are telling businesses they need to prepare for Brexit. But how do you prepare when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be? ArcelorMittal Sheffield, manufacturer of the Estate®WIRE brand of fencing, shared with us what they are doing to prepare for Brexit.
Over the past three months, ArcelorMittal have been working hard to ensure their supply chain is robust enough to handle a no deal Brexit situation.
“If there is a no deal, hard Brexit situation, the first, obvious point to make is that we are a UK manufacturer. We are not importing our Estate®WIRE fencing range from Europe so there will be no delays getting product into us to sell back out again to our customers as we are making our products in-house at our Sheffield factory” commented CEO Tony Hinchliffe.
What will affect ArcelorMittal Sheffield in a no deal situation, like every other UK manufacturer, is the ability to bring wire supplies in without delay. They are however, quite unique in this situation as their wire supplies are sourced internally from their parent company.
“Although our parent company are based in Europe, we have our own fleet of cargo ships and are able to import directly to one of our ArcelorMittal sites located at the port in Kent and then transport to Sheffield using normal UK road haulage” explained Tony. “This is an inter company sale, shipped using inter company transport directly to our facility at the docks minimising any border control back log issues that are going to arise” he added.
In addition to this, ArcelorMittal have been busy stocking up their newly opened 2000sqm warehouse with finished products, as well as re-structuring their whole warehouse area to maximise the amount of raw material that can be stored.
“By the end of October, both our finished goods stock, and our raw material wire stocks will be at maximum levels and significantly higher than they have ever been in the history of the company. This will ensure we have enough breathing space for production and supply to not be affected by border control delays arising from Brexit” Tony explained. “A stock of wire is also being held at our parent company, ready to be called in at short notice just as extra security”.
