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Ammo is weird because you have the government and consumer markets. We only see shortages for consumers. High prices and a larger market should attract increa

Ammo is weird because you have the government and consumer markets. We only see shortages for consumers. High prices and a larger market should attract increased manufacturing capacity. Could be interesting for a new highly automated robotic factory to bring down costs?

beerandt 5y ago
Ammo is a government first market, not a parallel market. Factories generally have to fill their government orders first, then sell govt runs 2nds/rejects (in military calibers) to consumers, and then manufacture consumer specific rounds with surplus factory capacity. Automation at factories to this point has generally resulted in lower quality products. People still want it because it's cheap, but there's a balance between price and how bad of a product people will tolerate.
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
As far as automation and larger throughput, the machine exist, but at the scale of the market under normal conditions, it doesn’t make sense to plan on panics. At least it didn’t traditionally. If Federal or Sellier invest in a n% more machines now, they will be a year or two out, and who knows what the market will look like then? Under Trump, the market was fairly slow and these companies would have had too much capacity for their sales. Normally, I’m told the ammo companies like to plan perfectly filling one shift. Then on panics being able to run 3 shifts a day (which they all are now). Being set up to run your 10 big machines for 24hr at a time is a better plan than 30 machines and 20 normally sitting idle, because in the scenario you COULD run 30 machines at 24hr, you are going to run out of components anyhow. That is another issue, it isn’t the assembly that is the ultimate bottleneck, almost powder comes out of maybe four places in the world, same for primers. Right now as I understand, it’s really a primer shortage, but no on is sitting on mountains of spare powder either. I’ve had 20k primers carved out on order of 200k for 9 months now. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon.

beerandt 5y ago

Ammo is a government first market, not a parallel market. Factories generally have to fill their government orders first, then sell govt runs 2nds/rejects (in military calibers) to consumers, and then manufacture consumer specific rounds with surplus factory capacity. Automation at factories to this point has generally resulted in lower quality products. People still want it because it's cheap, but there's a balance between price and how bad of a product people will tolerate.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

As far as automation and larger throughput, the machine exist, but at the scale of the market under normal conditions, it doesn’t make sense to plan on panics. At least it didn’t traditionally. If Federal or Sellier invest in a n% more machines now, they will be a year or two out, and who knows what the market will look like then? Under Trump, the market was fairly slow and these companies would have had too much capacity for their sales. Normally, I’m told the ammo companies like to plan perfectly filling one shift. Then on panics being able to run 3 shifts a day (which they all are now). Being set up to run your 10 big machines for 24hr at a time is a better plan than 30 machines and 20 normally sitting idle, because in the scenario you COULD run 30 machines at 24hr, you are going to run out of components anyhow. That is another issue, it isn’t the assembly that is the ultimate bottleneck, almost powder comes out of maybe four places in the world, same for primers. Right now as I understand, it’s really a primer shortage, but no on is sitting on mountains of spare powder either. I’ve had 20k primers carved out on order of 200k for 9 months now. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon.