Being able to source disposable gloves when needed is essential for any distributor. If your customers have a need, you want to be able to fill it quickly and efficiently.
The ability to source gloves at scale—an unpredictable and expensive proposition—is priceless.
Lots of people and companies can claim to be reliable. What do reliability and consistency in relation to the industrial disposable glove market mean to you?
Here is what they mean to us:
When you partner with AMMEX, you get a lot more than a company selling you single-use gloves.
For one thing, you get to feel confident. And there’s a lot of benefit in that.
There is nothing worse than when you and your customers are waiting on products. Not only is it aggravating and heartburn-inducing, but it also can damage your business relationships.
Don’t put yourself through the headaches of wondering when your shipments are going to arrive. If you use vendors that are not well-connected with a network of factories, it can cause problems for keeping your customers supplied.
Everybody expects disposable gloves to be of top quality. It’s considered the baseline (even if not every vendor lives up to it).
Very few vendors that sell gloves, however, go a step further and insert an extra layer of quality control that involves 100% inspections.
Have you ever had questions about which disposable gloves match your needs? Although the topic may seem mundane, single-use gloves are a lot more nuanced than many people think.
In a business that has become largely transactional, AMMEX has systems and processes in place to make sure your questions are answered and your needs fulfilled—by actual humans.
Domestic transportation prices—another important variable in the overall cost of single-use gloves—spiked during the pandemic. They have been dropping, but are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels due to the cost of labor and the general impact of inflation and higher interest rates.
Most companies that need warehousing to store imported products, such as disposable gloves, have seen significant price increases over the past two to three years. Even as supply chain inflation slows, warehouse rates are high because there is a lot of inventory, which leaves less space for new product.
International shipping is another cost variable that exerts outsized influence on the price of disposable gloves.
Ocean freight rates in 2023 have been on a steady decline for shipping containers from SE Asia to U.S. West Coast ports. Experts fear transport companies will try to force up prices by making fewer voyages and leaving containers behind, delaying the delivery of goods.
The three primary variables that have an often outsized impact on the single-use glove market are production, international logistics, and U.S. market conditions. Within those variables are a number of sub-variables that can move in opposite directions and in different timelines.
Production happens primarily in Southeast Asia, where up to 80% of single-use gloves are made. The biggest glove-making countries are Malaysia and Thailand—which have dominated the glove trade for years—Vietnam, and Indonesia. China is also a growing player in the global market.
Over the past three years, three primary variables—production, transcontinental logistics, and U.S. market logistics—have combined to keep the disposable glove market dynamic and at times volatile. Their impact has been surprisingly outsized.
In 2020, the pandemic turned the market (and the world) upside down. Shortages and price increases added challenges at every level of the business. Manufacturers turned their production lines over to thin medical-grade gloves. As a result, industrial products—especially thick and heavy nitrile—became scarce and expensive.
