I wanted to share the following post on LinkedIn with Diary of a Tile Addict’s readers because I have seen no coverage – in either B2B tile/construction magazines, newspapers, TV, or online news outlets – about the hidden costs of the Israel-USA attacks on Iran, and the subsequent impact on the global energy market, on world trade in general, and the ceramic tile sector in particular. To be clear, they have been both sudden and severe, showing just how little contingency exits in global industrial production and distribution.
The post comes from Hiren Varmora, Managing Director of one of India’s leading tile and surface brands, Varmora Group. It makes sobering reading.
The first sign of a crisis in Morbi is not noise. It is the silence.
The world is in chaos right now. Geopolitical tensions are at an all-time high. And the effects have reached Morbi, silencing the kilns that have been the city’s lifeline for a century. Out of 800 factories in Morbi, nearly 750 of them have shut down already.
The last time these factories were closed was during the COVID-19 lockdown. To see that silence repeated is a tragedy for me and hundreds of ceramic businesses.
This shutdown is personal, a tragedy that goes beyond headlines. It is conversations on the shop floor. It is the uncertainty in planning. It is the quiet anxiety of people whose lives depend on these factories running every day.
This phase is difficult. There is no denying that. But it is also a moment to reset how we think about growth.
Now is the time to look for alternatives. Like our tiles, this heat is only bound to make us stronger.
For years, Morbi has been a story of scale, speed, and unmatched execution. But this pause is asking us a different question: What are we built on when the system is under stress?
Morbi will recover. It always has. The real question is, what version of Morbi do we rebuild from here?
Hiren Varmora, Managing Director, Varmora Group
To find out more about Varmora Group, follow the link below: