In order to fill orders of more popular ammunition, Hornady is going to stop making some types of ammo and ammunition components. This will help them respond to the overwhelming demand placed on them this year.
Calls for increased gun control on the national and state levels has thrown consumer demand into a frenzy, with people stripping the market completely dry of all stockpiled and warehoused ammo, and buying everything that comes out of factories on the spot.
In addition to helping Hornady catch up on the back-orders for their products in the highest demand, this will help them produce more ammunition as well, as swapping out the tooling to manufacture a wider spread of ammunition components takes time. By keeping the same tools in production, they can operate for longer and produce more ammo.
At the same time, Hornady is expanding, adding more machinery and capacity to increase their production capabilities.
This is welcome news as many ammo makers are not willing to spend what can amount to millions of dollars to increase their production capacity only to have demand drop in coming months and years.
Hornady is counting on the increased popularity of shooting sports and self-defense practice driving demand well into the future; gun ownership and recreational shooting is at an all-time high and shows no sign of slowing down, and it’s hard to imagine that Hornady won’t be able to find customers for all their shiny new ammo down the road.
It’s also clear that Hornady expects this to cause some strife. The company has long been a supplier of uncommon chamberings and components. They also make really modern hunting and self-defense loads for some classic guns that few other companies bother with at all if not for maybe a box of light-loaded ball ammo here and there.
Speaking to his customers, Steve Hornady also wanted to make sure that no one comes to the conclusion that any of this is the result of direct government interference or other shenanigans.
“There is no conspiracy from the government to shut us down, this is not an effort on our part to raise prices,” said Hornady. “We haven’t raised prices. If they are higher, that’s at the store level, not at the manufacturing level.”
“We’re going to do everything we can, by adding people, by adding machinery, by adding square footage in order to try make more of what you want to buy,” he continued. “On the list of items that we kept we have over 270 of our projectiles and over 140 different rounds of ammunition. There is something there for everyone.”
Hornady has put up an interim product list of their truncated catalog. Despite it being “cut down” the list is still fairly impressive, with their limited inventory still quite a bit larger than other prominent ammo manufacturers.
The company is still producing 9x18mm Makarov, .30 Carbine and even .32 NAA and .416 Rigby. They really are making “something for everyone.” Here is their temporary prospectus and here is their official statement regarding this provisional policy.
And as promised, the company is still manufacturing a wide variety of popular service and sporting cartridges and components, with a full spread of ammo for 9mm, .40 S&W, .380 and .45 ACP handguns, ammo for ARs in .223 Remington, 5.56 NATO, 6.5 Grendel and 6.8 SPC and Russian cartridges including 5.45 and 7.62x39mm loads and a 7.62x54mmR load. They’re also dedicated to their selection of hunting cartridges for just about every major chambering out there, from varminting to big game cartridges.
“By cutting down on that list, temporarily suspending them, we’re able to get more uptime on our machinery and get more bullets out the door for you,” added Hornady.
This move may delay delivery of some products to a few customers for some time, months and hopefully not years. But it will increase the general supply of ammo on the market, which is a very good thing.