Decentralized marketplace for industrial bearings launched

Whether in the mobility sector, in industrial plants or logistics – industrial bearings guarantee that everything runs smoothly. Our highly industrialized world could not work without them. That is why today the production, trading and deployment of all different kinds of bearings is a worldwide multi-billion business. Many manufacturers, wholesalers and smaller trading companies are involved, but the international trading of bearings is non-transparent and characterised by inefficient markets with sham offers and plagiarised products. These issues cause mistrust between market participants and are making buying and selling of bearings a laborious and time-consuming effort. This is where BEARING X steps in.

"The aim of BEARING X is to bring together market participants from the international bearing industry via an online trading platform, enabling market participants to provide binding market offers, achieving leaner processes, higher transparency in the supply chain, as well as fair prices and guaranteed quality" says Alexander Witte, Managing Partner of Early Brands.

The project started in July 2019 and only 8 month later, the project partners were able to launch the first version of the BEARING X platform, which comprises of the entire trading process from order upload to trade execution. Since then, PONTON is operating the platform in a cloud environment. The system went live with a start community of users, to focus on feedback and learnings as well as to establish trust in the process. Since then, BEARING X has continuously expanded the feature set, onboarded new users and is now ready to scale the traded volume. “Trading bearings has never been so fast and easy” is the guiding mission of BEARING X. All this is done in close collaboration with the users from the bearing industry – professional buyers, sellers and their teams.

"BEARING X shows that electronic markets work for more products than just shares, commodities, or financial assets. They also help to increase transparency, efficiency and transaction speed for complex-structured products like ball bearings. At PONTON, we are proud of being part of this development and helping to digitalise traditional trading of industrial components" says Dr. Michael Merz, Managing Director of PONTON GmbH.

Highlights of the BEARING X trading platform:

• Peer-to-peer marketplace for direct buying and selling, allowing participants to monitor the marketplace, track own orders and executed trades with just a few clicks.
• Developed together with users from design sprint to operating trading system.
• Pleasant user interface providing strong usability and easy navigation across the platform.
• Sophisticated filter functionality enabling the trader to easily find the desired bearing out of the vast number of different items.
• Individual blacklisting of market participants to, e.g., exclude certain competitors from viewing an order or to trade only with well-known market participants.
• High-performance technology stack, which allows an automated and speedy order generation from stock-files even if containing more than 30.000 different items.
• State-of-the-art technology, based on streaming architecture and using resilient public cloud environments provided by the main hyperscalers.

Do you want to learn more about the BEARING X platform? Visit www.bearingx.io and request further details.

EARLY BRANDS GmbH
EARLY BRANDS Innovation & Technology Consultants incubate user-driven innovation and technology initiatives. They facilitate innovation and technology success and new business model creation and development: From world-wide scouting, insight-driven concept and use case creation to agile execution. Hand in hand with employees and users, leading technology partners as well as investors. Learn more at www.earlybrands.de