Reply From ILFORD Photo / Price Increases
Dear All,
Sorry for the delay in replying, I have been out the office for a few days:
Well firstly lets knock the 'nearly double' price increases on the head, the average increases worldwide across the full product ranges are between
5.00% and 6.00%.
Within the product ranges we have had some higher percentage increases on certain products to reflect the actual ( higher ) cost of manufacture of those items, the alternative I need not tell you is to no longer manufacture those products, that would be against our strategy of supplying the widest range of monochrome products in the World ( and to introduce new ones ). The current SKU's are a little over 3,000 items.
Within our pricing review certain products have had no increase or a small increase and a dozen or so products have been decreased in price.
You will see therefore prices will change, for instance smaller pack sizes ( like 10's or 25's ) will go up by more than 50 sheet or 100 sheet boxes, why.... because they cost more to make, simple as that. Sheet film has been mentioned, that is very much a raw material and wastage issue, I am sure you can imagine quality for us is everything, sheet film has a higher % wastage than 120 or 35mm, we have always taken waste as a broadly flat calculation, now with more sophisticated costing we must apply specific wastage calculation by product, hence a bigger increase for sheet film.
Why the increase ? : Much of it is raw materials, with the massive reduction Worlwide in silver based manufacture of film and paper, the individual components ( we have well over 300 suppliers ) are being increased in price
to reflect the lower volumes sold. Also, in the past we could buy raw materials in fairly small volumes as befits our size, now as one of the last full range suppliers many of our suppliers we have minimum orders that we have to purchase, only last week we had to buy a specific chemical required in paper manufacture and the minimum order equated to 2.5 years manufacturing requirement, we have to have it, so we now have to hold and pay for that stock.
I have not yet mentioned Silver ( now at a 29 year high ) this is of great concern, and since the biggest user was Photo, and now that demand has crashed why are the prices rising day by day ? ...well they are, its a fact and we buy it by the tonne, literally. The estimate we had for the silver price ( in our increases ) when we did our pricing review ( December 05 ) were much lower, so we are obviuously concerned as to the effect.
Finally our factory is powered by gas, and we use a lot, especially during coating, our gas bill has gone up a bit... EIGHTY SIX PERCENT, yes thats not a typo 86% was the increase Q4 2005 to Q1 2006, now we do expect that to reduce as we come to the warmer quarters, but cheap gas in Europe is a thing of the past, cold winter, higher demand, higher prices are affecting everyone....
Someone in the thread mentioned mentioned the price of gasoline, its one of our costs as well, and we know US gas prices are increasing but you have quite a way to go before you pay the same as us, as of today our gasoline price is $ 6.39 per US Gallon.
Yes we do have some price issues, someone mentioned multigrade filters, well you will see how we will be creative, to overcome that particular issue in the next few months.
Finally, we have completed our first years trading, we are profitable, and we will take whatever actions required to continue to be so, but as of today we have no plans* for any further increases before May 2007.
The only factor that can change that is external ( raw materials )
Thank you for purchasing ILFORD Photo products:
Simon.
What happens is that I meet someone in public, talk about photography, and have a blast with that conversation. But the next thing I know is that I'm back in my darkroom with a fresh package of photo paper and chemicals, and that's about it. 
