If you have spent a few minutes looking through our product offerings, you will have noticed that we truly are on a mission to bring affordable titanium to the masses. As of this writing, we have surpassed 40,000 items, and recently I directed our Drafting Department to increase our offerings of Grade 5 (6Al-4V) titanium bolts, socket head cap screws and flat head cap screws up to 4 inches in diameter. You might be wondering, why in the world would we add 4 inch diameter titanium bolts?

Every product that we offer comes about due to customer demand. The desire for extremely large titanium fasteners started with those companies developing power plants using ocean currents. We now know that bridges, skyscrapers and all sorts of large construction projects need these titanium fasteners.

Of course, it is one thing to offer a product, and quite another to make that product affordable. After studying our products and prices, you will notice that there is sometimes quite a variance in prices between similar products. There are two reasons for this. The first is production run size and the second is manufacturing technology.

We are all familiar with stainless steel and know that the production runs for stainless steel fasteners are massive, resulting in a low cost per individual fastener. Just like it used to be years ago with stainless steel, titanium faces the chicken and the egg dilemma. You can’t get prices down without large production runs, and you can’t get large production runs unless you get prices down. So what is a manufacturer of titanium products to do? The answer is work hard.

Let me use a simple 1/4 inch X 1 inch flat head machine screw as an example. McMaster-Carr, one of our distributors, sells these in 316 stainless steel for 42 cents each to the public. Two years ago, we could only produce these in grade 2 (CP) titanium via machining at a price to the public of 4.16 each. Today, we are forging these at minimum production runs of 500 for 1.34. You might say that there is a big difference between 42 cents and 1.34. My reply is that there is a bigger difference between 316 stainless steel and titanium. Titanium is lighter, stronger and completely corrosion free in the natural environment. I would also reply that there is a huge difference between 4.16 and 1.34.

At production runs of 5000, the price for our titanium screw drops to 1.14. The truth is that titanium manufacturing runs of 500 or even 5000 are small compared to the production runs used to manufacture stainless steel screws. We know that as our sales volumes rise, so will our production run sizes, resulting in further cost reduction.

As you browse through our products and you see something that you believe could have a sales volume for you of hundreds, or even thousands, if the price was just low enough, please feel free to give us a call. We truly do work hard and it is common sense that product volume results in lower cost.

We are always willing to work with you to get the costs down, especially when developing new products.

Thanks for your time,

Christopher Greimes
CEO
Allied Titanium, Inc.

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CEO Letter #2