At their February meeting, Luxfer announced the company, one of the largest and well-known producers of scuba cylinders, will divest most of the aluminium cylinder product lines.
At a time when Scuba cylinder demand in Australia is at an all-time high, and supply is tight due to spiralling freight costs and manufacturers focusing on production of Oxygen cylinders, both due to Covid, this will likely further impact supply.
We supply and stock aluminium cylinders from Catalina (our biggest seller), Luxfer and AMS for our Australian clients. We also supply Steel (Faber) to our customers down south and Composite cylinders for specialist dive applications.
According to Mark Gresham of PSI-PCI, this is a significant development for the scuba diving industry. “This news means Luxfer will no longer be producing cylinders in the United States and that the existing Luxfer Aluminium Division in the United States has been sold. Further, Luxfer will only be producing composite cylinders.”
Gresham points out that Luxfer Cylinders are used by virtually all levels of scuba diving operations including retailers, resorts, live-aboard and training facilities.
Key Aluminium Cylinder manufacturers remaining in the Scuba market place include Catalina, Advanced Material Systems (AMS) which is sold as Spirotek in Australia, Worthington and Metal Impact (Thunderbird) who are known for their colourful metallic stock range.
We’ve noticed an increase in demands for Composite cylinders in recent years (Luxfer and AMS are big in this space) so it will be interesting to see how it develops.
It is worth noting that total worldwide Aluminium Scuba Cylinder sales are actually quite a small portion of the Cylinder market, and with the difficulties in the raw material supply chain at the moment, we can expect to see further changes.
The full Luxfer press release can be found here
Safe Diving!
J-Shark
