raising rates and making loans tougher to come by. The responses to the survey show that manufacturers, which have already been struggling with supply-chain disruptions and labor shortages, are not immune to these pressures.
Then, too, manufacturing execs remained largely optimistic about their own companies’ sales and profits. Nearly two-thirds said they expected first-quarter sales to be higher than in the same period last year, and a similar number said they expected profit for the first quarter to beat last year’s comparable-period results.
One factor buoying those results may be price increases. More than three-quarters of manufacturing execs said they’d already hiked prices in 2023. Of those that upped prices, 47% had implemented a 5% to 10% increase and another 44% had raised prices by 11% or more, a potentially large hit to consumers.
More than three-quarters of manufacturing execs said they’d already hiked prices in 2023, and many of them had done so by double-digits.