August 2024 Volume 6

PRESIDENT'S NOTE

PRESIDENT'S NOTE

I ndia: The new China – at least when it comes to sourcing away North American forgings. At the Inter national Forgemasters

Public Policy Committee: Committee members exceed 20 now, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the increased participa tion these last couple of years. With the FIA Board’s leadership and significant investment in additional lobbying, our retained trade attorney firm, and additional staff – we’ve made real progress getting noticed in the government and DOD. We’ve also scored impressive investments from the DOD into our industry, both FIA directly and the industry at large. Trade Case: We are getting close to having enough financial data for our trade attorney to recommend FIA support for a trade case against both closed and open-die overseas forgers who dump forgings (anti-dumping/ AD violators) or are subsidized by their home country (counter-vailing duty/CVD violators). The Attorneys have spent the last few months analyzing ship manifest data to identify the likely offenders. If we come up short, it will be because of members who have not come forward to complete the financial survey necessary to show the trend-line data of year-over-year financial damage due to dumped/unfairly traded forgings. Some members hold out because of fear of releasing their data (FIA never sees this data). FIA and our attorney firm have never…. I repeat never -- had a member financial data breach. I would encourage ALL FORGING PRODUCERS to complete the survey. We will be sending the survey link again here soon and I will personally be reaching out to all FIA producer organizational reps to complete it. I am confident we will get the data we need and expect the data to show we have chronic damage to our members year-over-year. Assuming this, the entire membership will

be asked to step-up to do their part helping to fund the case. Capacity Utilization Survey: FIA has turned to a trusted third-party to manage collecting member capacity utilization data to increase the survey credibility. The survey link was sent to all FIA Member Organi zational Reps (ORs) for completion. We will use the results in a PR campaign in September aimed at the DOD and general markets to show we do have the capacity and there is no need to source forgings over seas. Our FIA-led survey in March showed capacity utilization at 65% and forecasted the rest of the year at 67%. ICON: A DOD sourcing database that will now include forgings, castings and machining. An association partner (DOD funds) has contracted us to build out the forging producers and capabilities within the ICON database. Pursuit of Automation: FIA will participate in the next ARM (Adv Robotics for Mfg) workshop on August 29th in Pittsburgh as we contribute to the roadmap of automation issues impacting forgers and casters. We have several FIA members committed to attend and participate; reach out to me if you are interested. This will lead to significant DOD funding coming back to our industry to do projects to increase the use of automation in our plants.

Conference & Expo in Milan (May), Indian and Chinese open-die forgers dominated attendance. From presentations we learned of massive investments that both China and India are making via what I would argue are ill-gotten gains from dumped and country subsidized forgings. Even our ally the U.K is getting in on the party, with massive govern ment investment planned for Sheffield Forgemasters – a state-owned enterprise. The current news here in North America is members reporting major Ag OEMS are once again boarding planes and heading to India to source forgings, and in one Ag OEM case most of their forgings. OEMs chasing the cheap forging is nothing new and has been happening since China was allowed entry into the WTO in late 2001. It appears that the supply chain lessons COVID taught us have already been forgotten. We can’t expect OEMS (and Primes) to act patriotically, i.e. a strong domestic forging industry allows for fulfilling the DOD’s lower volume forging needs. Unless forced by law…perhaps we need a ‘Buy North American’ law on ALL FORGINGS. I think it is time we started thinking this way, as we observe increasing non-democratic aggressive behaviors by various countries. What should we as an industry be doing to counter the off shoring of our livelihoods? We need more participation by more of our membership if we are going to make signifi cant progress. Here is where we are at:

James R. Warren President and CEO Forging Industry Association

PUBLISHER James R. Warren jwarren@forging.org MANAGING EDITOR Angela Gibian angela@forging.org Editorial Staff

Board of Directors

Antonio Alvarez Robert Brodhead Robert Dimitrieff

Chelsea Lantto Louis Philippe Lapierre Jose Lozano Mike Morgus Matt Natale

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Amanda Dureiko amanda@forging.org DESIGN Lorean Crowder lorean@forging.org

CHAIRPERSON Jim Kravec VICE CHAIRPERSON Joe Schwegman

Bret Halley Jeff Krueger

FIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 2024 1