Entering the Second Decade of the 21st Century – The State of the U.S. Paint and Coatings Industry

By George R. Pilcher

Insight into the state of the U.S. coatings industry is valuable for many-whether you are directly employed by paint and coatings com­panies or suppliers of specialty chem­icals used within the industry; serve as an industry observer interested in correlating the health of the industry with similar enterprises in the spe­cialty chemicals market space; work for an independent formulating and/ or testing laboratory that does business with the coatings industry; or work on Wall Street charged with analysis of the paints and coatings sector.

Regardless of the reason(s) for your interest in the coatings industry-and regardless of what you are planning to do with this information-it is statistically unlikely that you will read this article about the current state of the paint and coatings industry in 2019, and then lose no time hiring technical and marketing people to help you create a strategy for getting through the coming (and inevitable) recession, whenever it occurs, and then going on to glory following the end of the recession.

Here is a newsflash for anyone who has a sufficiently strategic point of view to follow this line of thinking: Play your cards right by making sure that you are either maintaining (or increasing) your technical and marketing departments during downturns in the economic cycle, and developing the products that your customers are going to need following the next recession, and you will be living the high life when the economy begins to recover. If you don’t maintain your technical and marketing staff during downturns under the mis­taken impression that they are expend­able, you do so at your own peril.