Anyone here attending PRI this week?

Steve Hoelscher

True Classic
I was wondering if anyone here was planning to attend the Performance Racing Industry trade show in Indianapolis this week (Thursday - Saturday).

If you are attending I'll be there exhibiting in booth 4211. Stop by and say hi. You can also check out our new track car.

PRI 2021 Booth 4211.jpg
 
I'd love to be there but can't. I've attended the SEMA show for about 30 years but never made it to PRI. It's on my bucket list; especially in recent years as it has gained a noticeable growth lately. Hopefully this year's show will not be a complete dud like SEMA was, where COVID still impacted participation significantly (more than 50% decrease in both attendees and exhibitors). Have fun and take some pics for us.
 
Jeff, I didn't go to SEMA this year but should have. First year I missed in a long time. Just had too many things going on right then. I'll be there next year.

There was no PRI last year and I know that the exhibitor count is down some this year, but certainly not as much as SEMA. Three years ago it looked as if PRI had outgrown the Indy Convention Center. This year not so much. I'll be interested to see how attendance is affected. I am sure it will be down with the Canadian boarder closed and a significant number of attendees are from Europe and South America. Even some from the far east.
 
Had a successful PRI show. Good response to the car.

There were more empty booths than I have ever seen there although there weren't a lot. I did notice a couple of peninsula spaces (booths at the end of a row incorporating both the "front and back" of the row) that were empty. Those had to be last minute no shows. Perhaps exhibitors were scared off by the low turnout at SEMA. Or, exhibitors are having issue with their supply chain and can't fill existing orders. I noted that when I went to talk to Aim (the data acquisition/dash display company) the first thing they said was they were having problems filling orders.

Attendance was good. Friday was especially busy.
 
The chip shortage is affecting a broad section of all industries. We have parts that are months out into the future, customers are not happy.

Who would think furniture could be affected by a chip shortage.
 
My wife and I went furniture shopping at one of the big warehouse furniture stores and the nice salesman said if we see anything we like it will be around a year to 18 months for delivery! And here we thought the previous normal of eight weeks was a long time. We already gave up on new car shopping.
 
Who would think furniture could be affected by a chip shortage.
Exactly. There are a lot of things being blamed on the virus that really do not make sense to me. I'm sure some of it has a legitimate back story, but I also believe a lot of it is just a good excuse to capitalize on the situation to gouge the market and increase profits. I read a interesting article in a financial publication about the record level inflation that's currently going on and it said basically that was a main reason for it.
 
Exactly. There are a lot of things being blamed on the virus that really do not make sense to me. I'm sure some of it has a legitimate back story, but I also believe a lot of it is just a good excuse to capitalize on the situation to gouge the market and increase profits. I read a interesting article in a financial publication about the record level inflation that's currently going on and it said basically that was a main reason for it.
For automotive the car companies and the chip companies did not expect the market to come back so fast so they didn’t invest in making/stocking product specific to this application. Combine that with massive consumer spending on electronic widgets, again far beyond the expected volume due to people being cooped up in their homes with little to do or spend money on (no travel, no restaurants, movies etc).

The other factor has been transport, we literally have had stuff sitting on the water for weeks and then the morass of then getting it off the coast.

Supply chains have just gotten so complex and so reliant on just enough and no more investment in stock than you expect to sell (hyper efficiency) and any hiccup in that process will cause delays which then get compounded by shortages in other parts that mean an entire product is held up due to some minor component. Due to the way a database for a Bill Of Materials is structured, if any one element in the BOM is not avialable then the whole thing can’t ship or in many cases even be scheduled to be made. Breaking a BOM apart so one can deliver the object and then mate the missing part requires major database work, unfortunately many companies downsized their IT orgs during the downturn and don’t have the staff to go back and change quickly.

As someone watching this from inside a company its painful and there is very little we as a manufacturer can do.
 
As someone watching this from inside a company its painful and there is very little we as a manufacturer can do.
Agreed. I work for a manufacturing company. We had what turned out to be the good fortune of a few critical suppliers falling flat on us a few years ago. We were sole sourced on some critical components, and cultivated a broader supply base.

Not to say we haven't had challenges, but they are less severe than they would have been had the pandemic happened a few years earlier than it did.
 
We are seeing issues with the supply chain too. Long leads on some of our critical components.

With a week to digest the attendance it would appear that there were far fewer international exhibitors and attendees. While traffic was good the attendance seemed to be much more midwest based. Less west coast, south and east attendance. And I had no one from outside the US stop in our booth. I am used to seeing Europe, South America and a few from the Pacific Rim. This year, none. Zip.
 
Apparently this has been going on for some time now but I just learned about it recently. Another shortage supposedly resulting from Covid is US currency, specifically all coins and $100 bills. Seems the government decided to shut down the mint and now we can't back up our nation's financial reserves. How the hell could that ever happen? Are they really that stupid? o_O
 
Back
Top