The number of times this product has been granted a concession since launch in April 2018 is 22. This is 22 months out of 70 in total, which means that it has had a concession in one in three months.
The period between the peak of the first concessionary period, and the second was around about two and a half years, however, the time between the second and the third is almost exactly a year. This suggests that manufacturers are becoming increasing reticent to manufacture this product.
Often market prices of products fall to new lows just prior to price rises, shortages and concessions. Before the first shortage average market prices fell £1.14, before the second to £0.87 and before the third to £1.27. This suggest there is no great consistency in the market prices which frighten manufacturers out of the market, however the highest of these prices £1.27 maybe the point at which manufacturers asked themselves, “What’s the point in making it? We can’t make any money out of this product. “
If we therefore assume that this is roughly where manufacturers consider leaving the market, and calculate the number of months in which the average price has fallen below £1.30, we can see this happened five times in 2019, twice in 2020, five times in 2021, seven times in 2022 and three times in 2023. This run of tough pricing environments may simply have pushed more manufacturers to pull out and stay out.
Consequently, market prices went up to £14.21 in January on average and concessions had to be pushed up to over £15 to cover this. If stock is limited anyway, and manufacturers are challenged with the amount they can actually release to Europe, they may decide to forgo the UK market and put the stock where it can make a profit.
The difficulty now will be persuading them to come back to the UK. Otherwise concessions will become more or less permanent along with high market prices.