Hi, I’m Paul Darley, and thanks for tuning into our July issue of inside Darley. We’re just back from Hannover, Germany for the Interschutz conference that typically takes place every five years, and due to COVID it hasn’t taken place since 2015. The show was very well attended. In 2015 it had 125,000 attendees. This year, it had about 85,000 attendees. So while the overall numbers were down, for Darley it was an excellent show. We had our entire international sales team there. We had customers from over 40 countries come and visit our booth.
The US fire service was also very well represented at this show, and even our own US Fire Administrator, Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, was in attendance, and she even took time to participate in a podcast with Kevin Sofen for Smart Firefighting in our booth.
Dr. Merrell also addressed the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs last month, and that’s a conference and an organization that we, as a company, have been supporting for over 35 years. She talked, as well as the talk of the show was, about diversity, equity and inclusion—DEI, as you’re probably aware. And it was so wonderful to see all the major metropolitan cities here in America as well as abroad who had women and people of color in leadership and fire chief positions. One of those leaders is the new fire chief from Baltimore County, Chief Joanne Rund, and she is featured, or Baltimore County is featured in our latest “We Switched” ad campaign that we’ve been running. Baltimore County, I believe, has ordered now up over 65 Pierce trucks with our Darley LDM pumps. We’re very proud to serve that department.
The US Fire Administration also just recently released a report on wildland urban interface. It’s a look at issues and resolutions, and we’ve attached that for you here as our first attachment. It came out on June 7th of this year and that’s one of the biggest issues facing the fire service today.
For our military customers, partners and vendors, I’d encourage you to check out the second file, which is called how to do business with USSOCOM. It talks about small business opportunities and some other things here for you.
If you’re watching Inside Darley, if you’re paying attention to us, you’re aware that we are investing heavily in all of these new robotics and metaverse areas. And in fact, we even launched a new division this year called our USMR division. That’s the Unmanned Systems, Metaverse & Robotics Division. The next article that we’ve attached here for you talks about what the metaverse is and talks about by the year 2030, it’s going to be over a $2 trillion market, if you can imagine.
So we’ve also attached for you our new brochures on our robotics, technology and innovation and our drone capabilities. Hopefully you’ll download those at www.darley.com if you’re watching this on social media.
The last attachment that we’ve given you here is a report by JP Morgan. It’s their mid-year outlook for 2022. And I have to tell you it’s grim. Their CEO and chairman, Jamie Dimon is probably one of the smartest guys I know. And he’s calling this a hurricane coming at us. The market in May kind of held its own. In the stock market in June, we saw a little bit of a bounce, what the stockbrokers would call a dead cat bounce, when there’s some bottom feeders who see a temporary recovery, but Jamie Dimon doesn’t agree with that in any event.
On a positive note, we live in the greatest country in the world. Hopefully you and your family are going to have a great 4th of July weekend. Thanks for all you do to protect us as first responders; we appreciate all that you do. And thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
