Long-awaited price deflation in the UK is now happening, a consultancy group has stated, advicing businesses to start renegotiating on bringing the prices down.
According to procurement and supply chain management consultancy INVERTO, businesses must now renegotiate with their suppliers to bring prices down – or lose out to their competitors as price competition heats up.
“The coming months are going to see significant price competition as costs come down, especially in certain commodities. Those businesses that are unable to cut prices in line with the rest of the market could lose out significantly," reports quoted Sushank Agarwal, Managing Director at INVERTO, as saying.
“Some of the major supermarket groups are already starting to compete more heavily on price – milk is one product where we’re seeing price cuts. This trend is going to be repeated across a whole range of industries. There are sectors, like luxury goods, where pricing matters less, but that’s a minority of the economy.
“A lot of businesses have fallen out of the habit of negotiating prices down over the last couple of years. They need to get back to doing that and quickly.”
Despite inflation in the overall Consumer Price Index only having fallen from 10.4 per cent in February to 10.1 per cent in March, INVERTO noted that it has seen costs start to fall noticeably across a range of products.
Agarwal suggested that businesses must “proactively engage” with suppliers and put pressure on them to cut their prices, just as suppliers put upward pressure on prices when inflation was rising. He noted that more businesses should now be looking to renegotiate and structure their contracts in a way that allows prices to decrease as inflation falls, rather than only moving in one direction.
“Every business in the UK will have seen its costs rise over the last 18 months, with suppliers blaming inflation for their own prices going up. Now that period is over, businesses have to push back in the other direction," Agarwal said.
To help businesses to monitor their suppliers’ costs and negotiate pricing with them, INVERTO has created its ‘Value Protector’ tool. The tool allows buyers to independently assess the costs of all their suppliers’ inputs across the locations in which they operate.
“Few suppliers are likely to want to share their input costs. Bridging that information gap is the most effective way of reaching an agreement that works for both parties. Customers that can come to a negotiation armed with that data put themselves in the best position to bring their costs down," Agarwal concluded.
