Hi, I’m Paul Darley. And thanks for tuning into our September issue of Inside Darley. Like you, here at Darley we’re doing a lot to plan for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And one of the things that team Darley will be doing is a stair walk down at Soldier Field in Chicago on Saturday 9/11. If you’re able to join us, we’d love to have you as a part of our team.
It was so great to see so many friends and business associates at FDIC. The show reported great attendance of 23,597 attendees that included exhibitors and fire chiefs. And I’ll tell you, our booth was busy the entire time with a lot of new technology from our FLAIM system to EMILY, to our Ascent AIT products and our new TSM pump. It was a really great. And we’ll see you in just seven or eight months for the next FDIC.
We also got some really good news from FAMA for the second quarter, relative to new fire apparatus orders reported by firetruck builders. You might know 2020 was down about 12% compared to 2019, with the second quarter of 2020, as you can imagine, being the worst. But it came roaring back in the second quarter of 2021 with new orders in the United States up 60%, Canada was up 88% and the international market continued to be down about 74% year to date. Taking the first half of the year in 2021, compared to 2020, the market was actually up 29%. So that continues to be good news.
Fire apparatus builders are busy. If you’re thinking about a new truck, I would encourage you to get that on order as soon as possible as most of these fire apparatus builders, while they’re busy, are beginning to have a lot of supply chain issues with chassis and other components. You can imagine Briggs and Stratton even impacts us as a pump manufacturer. If we order an engine today from Briggs and Stratton, the delivery is over one year. So we are currently out of some portable pumps, including some of our Davey lines and other portable pump lines that have Briggs and Stratton engines. We do have a limited supply of Honda, but we encourage you to get those on order quicker than normal as well. How do you combat supply chain issues? We’ve actually attached a couple of articles. One from the Financial Times talks about the shipping bottleneck coming out of China. The second is an article from Maritime Executive that talks about the same, with freight quotes and containers coming from China to the United States costing roughly ten times what they were just a year ago.
In the consumer price index, there’s a lot of pricing pressure. It was up 5.2% in the month of June. That’s the highest it had been since August of 2008. There’s a lot of commodity pressure, and we’ve actually attached an article from McKinsey that’s interesting called, “Defying Cost Volatility.” It gives you some strategic pricing ideas.
As we’re slipping now into this COVID Delta variant, we do have large amounts of PPE in stock—over a half a million masks. They’re 3M, model 8210. So we have very attractive pricing on those. We’ve attached for you a list of all of our in-stock PPE. You may need that as we head into the fall season.
And lastly, we lost two very close folks to us in the last month. One was Pat Long. She died at the age of 96. She was really kind of one of the matriarchs of our business. She was the sister of both Bill and Reg Darley and the mother of John Long and James Long. And she passed away at the age of 96, just a wonderful woman. She was sharp as a tack to the very end.
We also lost a great Darley disciple in Allen Huelsebusch, who was the number one industrial firetruck salesman in the world. He sold a lot of Darley—just about all Darley pumps on his industrial trucks. So our hearts go out to to Allen’s family during this time as well.
So thanks for tuning in to this issue of Inside Darley. If there’s anything we can be doing to support you, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
