Dear Sporting Shooters,

For those that missed last weeks’ article about the factory and our APS range of propellants you can read it here.

Today we’re going to talk about domestic propellant demand more generally and the challenges we continue to face.

Domestic Propellant Demand

Australian Munitions has historically kept stock on hand, to allow our distributors (OSA and Winchester Australia) to place orders on us at any time of the year. Granted there have been occasions where particular orders have exceeded the current volume of stock on hand, and deliveries were delayed for a number of internal and external factors, but generally speaking – we had stock of popular propellants available.

However, over the past 12 months, and as far back as mid-2019 for certain propellants, we haven’t been keeping up with demand from the market. This isn’t some big conspiracy designed to short change our Australian customers, and contrary to the rumours we hear all the time, no, we don’t ship propellant offshore to the USA to the detriment of Australian reloaders.

Quite simply though, the volume of propellant that the facility can produce has an upper limit. Combine this with the length of time it takes to manufacture a single batch of any type of propellant (roughly 6 months) and it is easy to see how sudden increases in market demand can affect availability on the whole.

The 2020 calendar year was no exception; not only did we have a pandemic that saw people sitting at home for long periods of time with additional time to reload, but we also saw a sudden influx of sales across the domestic firearm industry as a whole, which resulted in a level of demand for our products that we haven’t experienced in at least 6 years.

The level of demand was so unprecedented that we required an additional 40% of our typical annual volumes to maintain adequate supply.

As a result of this, we’ve spent the second half of 2020 working extremely closely with both OSA and Winchester Australia to establish some new strategies. These have now been implemented, and it is our hope that moving forward these types of events can be managed and minimised.

In our next news release, we will address the regional outlook.