North American Metals & Minerals Industry 30,000-Foot View Shows $70 Billion in Project Spending

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). When you are in an airplane at 30,000 feet on a clear day you can see the entire layout of the terrain below – forests, mountain ranges, farmland, and cities, along with the infrastructure connecting those features. Industrial Info takes a “30,000-foot view” of the North American Metals & Minerals Industry, providing an accurate picture of what the industry consists of and identifying hot sectors and project spending trends.

The Metals & Minerals Industry is a broad industry, which can be organized into thirteen major categories or sectors, covering operations that mine, process, melt, and/or finish metal and mineral products.

Click here to view a breakdown of the Metals & Minerals Industry showing the thirteen major sectors.

As far as project spending is concerned, historically, the dominant sectors are mining, steel and cement. Industrial Info is tracking almost 1,400 active projects in North America scheduled to begin construction in 2006 or beyond. These projects represent close to $70 billion in potential expenditures. The top six sectors command 84% of the planned project spending for the industry. They are mining (includes coal, minerals, and metals mining) with $39.5 billion, steel with $7.5 billion, cement with $4.9 billion, non-ferrous with $3.7 billion, glass with $2.1 billion, and gypsum with $1.2 billion. Increasing worldwide demand for raw materials and building materials is leading to rising prices for these commodities, which in turn is providing owner’s of Metals & Minerals Industry operations the necessary cash to expand and grow their businesses. Acquisition, consolidation, and physical expansion are the chief means that businesses are using to grow market share.

This is especially true this year for steel, cement, gypsum wallboard, coal, metal and mineral mining. All of these sectors are experiencing increased project spending as companies move to expand and grow these operations to meet growing demand.

The Confidence Factor for the Metals & Minerals Industry is high right now at 66%. A high confidence factor means that more projects are proceeding to the construction stage. The Confidence Factor is internally generated by Industrial Info to express the health of project spending for an industry, and represents the percentage of active project activity that is expected to come to fruition based on analyzing project trends and history for the previous 54 months. When applying the Confidence Factor to the current $70 billion worth of active projects, Industrial Info expects about $46.2 billion worth of Metals & Minerals Industry projects to move to the construction stage.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is a Marketing Information Service company that has been doing business for over 23 years. IIR is respected as the leader in providing comprehensive market intelligence pertaining to the industrial processing, heavy manufacturing, and energy-related industries throughout the world.