Filtermist, a company flush with business across Europe, is scrambling to fix a problem whose contours are maddeningly unknown. In less than 60 days, absent a sudden outbreak of amity in British politics, the country will crash out of the European Union without a deal spelling out what happens next.
Like the rest of British business, Filtermist, which makes devices that suck oil vapor out of factory air, cannot afford to simply wait and hope that everything works out. With the prospect of an unruly exit increasingly palpable, workers at a plant the company operates in Telford, a modest town in the Midlands of England, are rushing to assemble 800 clean-air units to stockpile in Europe.
The main culprit is the uncertainty that has discouraged commerce. Investment in the British auto industry plunged by nearly half last year as companies waited to see how Brexit would play out.
Filtermist will ship the units to a factory in southern Germany, squarely within the European Union. Then, come what may — whether politicians in Britain and Europe strike a deal, or whether the bewildering torment known as Brexit yields border chaos — the company can rely on that stash to get its goods to European customers after March 29, the day Britain is supposed to leave the European bloc.
This is the tiresome yet unavoidable nature of business as Brexit shifts from a theoretical event to something real: Companies must plan for outcomes both wildly unknown and potentially damaging. Fearful of havoc, they are stockpiling products, exploring new shipping routes and making backup plans, all the while having no idea how the adventure will end.
“What are we contending with?” asks Filtermist’s chief executive, James Stansfield. So long as he lacks an answer, his 50-year-old company will ship extra stock to Germany.
“It’s meant extra resources, extra overtime, to get it done,” he said. “Everybody’s stockpiling. It’s incredibly annoying. It’s frustrating.”
It also threatens to be expensive. The British economy is 2.3 percent smaller than it would have been absent the June 2016 vote that set Brexit in motion, according to a recent estimate from the Center for European Reform, a pro-European research institution.
The main culprit is the uncertainty that has discouraged commerce. Investment in the British auto industry plunged by nearly half last year as companies waited to see how Brexit would play out, a leading trade association said this week.
(Adapted from: The New York Times)