Some Powder from belgium, same lot that make ramshot, but possibly also from any manufacture, no idea for primers.
That's Eurenco P B Clermont, the Belgian state powder factory (P=Poudre; B-Belge; Clermont is a town in Wallonia just down the road from the Liege area and its arms and ammunition factories), since privatised like all such surviving facilities. After WW2, P B Clermont bought the technology and manufacturing rights of ball powder manufacture from Olin Industries in the US, and has been researching and improving it ever since and is a leader in this field. Since most militaries prefer ball powders to the stick type, military ammunition manufacturers are a natural customer for this firm, so I'd expect RG among others to use it for at least some products. Eurenco is a French centred multinational.
Nammo Vihtavuori Oy must be another likely supplier as it's always had a good hold on this market, especially for 7.62 NATO. The Viht N135 we can buy is the canister version of Viht's bulk grade for the standard NATO 144-147gn ball round, and the company must have sold many thousands of tonnes of it over the years. When NATO was heavily involved in the Balkans followed by the US led alliance activities in Iraq and Afghanistan post 2001, Vihtavuori was riding high on military orders and Eurenco decided to cash in and buy the company .......... at quite the wrong time. After Gulf 2 and the post-Saddam debacle in Iraq saw western countries turn away from military adventurism in dangerous unpredictable places, they really slashed military spending, not helped by the financial and economic panics created by the 2008 financial industry collapse. The demand for military smallarms ammunition and the powders it burns collapsed. (According to the Daily Telegraph in a report last year, the Bundeswehr no longer has enough serviceable rifles to issue one to every serving soldier, and live firing training has been cut to near nil due to ammunition shortages - an extreme case, but not untypical over the last decade.) Eurenco put Viht up for sale, and was within an ace of closing it as there were no offers made, Nammo (Lapua owner among other things) fortunately coming in at the last minute, otherwise we - and western militaries - would really be in a mess.
The long and the short of the present primer / powder situation is that western countries have reduced military expenditure to minimum levels, (or many pundits say WAY below the minimum levels that common sense dictates), and as part of a greedily grasped and over-exploited 'peace dividend' now rely on globalised private industry to meet their needs, those same companies who supply civilian shooters - and moreover, governments won't pay for any excess 'strategic' capacity to be retained either. Meanwhile, US civilian demand for firearms, ammunition, and ammunition components has seen unprecedented growth over the last few years.
The Year the Second Amendment Strikes Back
"Retailer survey data approximates almost 6.2 million first-time gun owners." [In the US and in 2020 alone!!!]
Federal primers have largely disappeared for instance as the company now needs most of its output for its own ammunition production mainly to domestic American customers.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/12/08/primers-gone/
The USA no longer makes any extruded powder types at all, nor has it done so for a generation since DuPont Industries got out of the Business and IMR production moved to Canada. American powder companies buy in powders mostly from European suppliers, plus Thales / ADI in Australia. That's right, all those good ole American outfits that sell what we think of as 'American powders' buy them in from foreigners, much of it from factories thousands of miles from their packaging / distribution plants and whose supply chains are now crippled and bearing vast rate increases because of the worldwide shipping crisis.
For example:
ALL Alliant Reloder grades from Eurenco Bofors in Sweden or Nitrochemie Wimmins in Switzerland. Only the two or three Power-Pro grades are US, ball types from the former Olin plant in St. Marks, Florida
ALL Hodgdon brand stick powders are supplied by Thales / ADI in New South Wales, Australia
ALL IMR brand powders by General Dynamics in Canada bar a couple which are from Thales / ADI in Australia.
.......... and so on and so forth with many other examples including some European ball powders being imported such as P B Clermont grades sold as Ramshot powders.
This risks supply chain bottlenecks capping availability and restricting the flexibility needed to meet growth in demand, or demand spikes in what is potentially a highly volatile market. (Think what a small to medium size war does to demand!) The government level attitude is to run on minimum purchases and stocks - there's no risk after all since the end of the cold war (!!?) - and we don't need any domestic strategic production capacity as there will always be a supplier somewhere who'll supply us at short notice at low prices. Funny that, same attitude as HMG has had for a generation on energy supplies, and look where that's leading us now!
Outside of wartime and its accompanying emergency decrees overriding normal regulations, it is all too easy to close explosive factories, and hard to open or expand them given the health & safety and other regulatory hurdles allied to fierce public opposition these days to any factory handling dangerous and explosive materials, especially in overcrowded mainland Europe and the British Isles. These barriers to entry and / or expansion make increasing production capacity expensive too, so a company has to be sure it has a secure
long-term market for additional output before it'll make large, risky investments.
www.henrykrank.com
Ken.
