Adhesive Costs and Market Share

The cost of structural adhesives will vary considerably depending on the format, the chemistry used, the end-user industry, the quantities being purchased and, to a certain extent, on the adhesive manufacturing company concerned. It is, therefore, not possible to give an indication as to cost per square metre or cost per kilogram, which is meaningful. 

In Fig. 101, an attempt is made to address this difficulty. Overall market data from the United States of America (source Skeist [44]) has been plotted to try to show the position of the aerospace business within the structural adhesive market as a whole. 

The x-axis shows the average selling price in /lb for the aerospace business this is in the region of 15- 25 per pound weight. It is important to remember that 

The y-axis shows the expected annual growth rate over a 5-year period to 1997. At 2.25-3.75% AGR, structural adhesives within the aerospace market show the most encouraging performance. 

The width of each data point shows the size of the market in millions of dollars (the scale indicator is logarithmic) the aerospace market is shown to be about 150 MM. This is highly significant when compared against the market volumes for the two biggest users of adhesive, the packaging and the automotive industry only 10 million pounds per annum as opposed to 80 and 60 million pounds, respectively. 

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