Plastics & Rubber World - July/August 2019 - 28

DISTRIBUTION

Respond to the market

Three major polymer distributors speak with PRW about how a
changing market is aﬀecting the overall service proposition

Price is quantitative, but
brand, product, service,
those are qualitative
Mike Boswell, Plastribution

WWW.PRW.COM | JULY/AUGUST 2019

ccording to information published
in 2017 by the British Plastics Federation (BPF), the UK processes about
3.3 million tonnes of plastic per year, with
a value of £13.1 billion. This helped to support annual domestic production of 1.7m
tonnes of plastic raw material.
This accounts for less than half the material processed by national converters,
with the remainder imported from various
global markets. The vast majority of this
material is received by the UK's distributor network, which then aggregates those
materials for delivery across the manufacturing base.
This aggregation is just part of the total
service package which each distributor offers to help diﬀerentiate themselves from
competitors. "We act as a buﬀer," says
Mike Boswell, MD of Plastribution. We can
aggregate based on customer demand
planning, ensuring inventory is available
so we can deliver what our customers
need, when they need it."
Based in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, midway between Birmingham and Nottingham, Plastribution leverages a full suite of customer
services to attract and maintain its network
of plastics manufacturing customers.
"Price is quantitative, but brand, product, service, those are qualitative," says
Boswell. They're more diﬃcult to value,
until anything goes wrong. Then it's up to
the distributor to make things right and
how they do that deﬁnes the business, the
value we represent."
Boswell, who is also chairman of the
BPF Polymer Distributors and Compounders Group, says that training and technical support is another key element of the
oﬀering, looking at ways to achieve solutions that the customer perhaps had not
considered.
The limiting factor to that is the polymer manufacturers themselves. "There

are limitations to how many suppliers
you can manage and they can have speciﬁc business areas where they want to
focus," says Boswell. Continuing, he says
that this can mean it's not always possible to supply speciﬁc industries. "We have
some suppliers which don't want to focus
on medical applications because of the
potential legal issues."
But while such issues might infringe on
the distributor's potential reach, Boswell
says it's his remit to be as ﬂexible as possible, in terms of polymer availability, delivery and support. "People buy from people; trusted partners," he observes.
The conversation with Polydist's CEO
for Europe, David Batchelor, is sprinkled
with that same word - ﬂexibility. Having
recently taken over from long-time company owner and director Richard Bradwell, Batchelor emphasises he is looking
to instil a culture of ﬂexibility across the
Burton-on-Trent based business to build
the service oﬀering.
"Apart from safety, I think ﬂexibility
is top of the pyramid when it comes to
customer focus," he says. But within that,
customers can expect to receive service
levels commensurate with their business
investment.
"There are two types of customer,"
says Batchelor. "There's the customer
which appreciates enhanced service and
the purely transactional customers. More
time should be spent with the ﬁrst, as the
second just simply prefers commodity
products at commodity prices."
He adds: "If you've got a limited resource, you can't treat all the customers
the same."

INTEREST IN RECYCLED POLYMER

"Our heritage, our business model, is to offer as broad a range of products as we can,"
says Mike Boswell. In addition to a series

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Plastics & Rubber World - July/August 2019

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