Despite the turbulent events of the past few months, Permasteelisa’s Europe chief executive Jalal Fitoury is still upbeat. The industry has become more attuned to dealing with geopolitical adversity, he says, in the wake of the covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine. 

But he does admit that he would prefer the crisis in the Middle East – where conflict and fragile, temporary truces appear to alternate regularly and repeatedly – to finally be over: “The Middle East [situation] creates a lot of uncertainty, it creates nervousness. Are investment decisions still happening? And so on.”

He adds: “To be honest, I think the industry has become more resilient. Post covid and Ukraine, we have learnt to deal with a level of uncertainty.

“The mood is still positive because we can see resilience in the industry. In the past – when covid hit us – we were all in shock and thinking, ‘what does this mean?’. Most things got paused. I don’t see that now. It’s ‘let’s try to work around this and find a solution, rather than stop and pause’.”