Anyone asking for a price per square metre usually wants a single figure to put in a spreadsheet. There isn’t one that is worth much. Honeycomb panel pricing moves with three things – thickness, order quantity and resin – and the number that should go in the spreadsheet is not the purchase price anyway.
What actually moves the price
Thickness. The dominant variable. Material cost scales with it, and a panel twice as thick costs meaningfully more than twice as much per square metre because of how the core is formed.
Quantity. Tooling and setup are real costs on a made-to-order panel. A small run carries them across few panels; a container load spreads them until they are negligible. The difference between a fifty-panel order and a two-thousand-panel order can be substantial on identical specification.
Resin and additives. Virgin polypropylene costs more than recycled content. UV stabilisation, flame retardant, anti-static – each adds. And there is the question of whether you need them: a panel used indoors in a return loop needs none of them.
Why price per square metre is the wrong metric
Because panels are bought to do a job for a period. A thin panel at a low price per square metre that gets crushed in two trips is more expensive than a thick one that lasts sixty. The comparison has to be cost per trip, and cost per trip needs a trip-life estimate, which is where honest suppliers and dishonest ones separate.
We covered the trip-life side in how long PP honeycomb panels last in a return loop, including the failure modes that end them early.
What to send a supplier to get a real quote
Panel dimensions, quantity, thickness if you know it – and if you don’t, the span and load. Application, because it determines whether you need additives. Whether the panels return. And the destination port, because freight on a bulky low-density product is not a rounding error.
A supplier quoting from “1200 x 800 mm honeycomb panel” is guessing at half the inputs, and the guess will be resolved later, in your favour or not.
The freight caveat
Honeycomb panels are mostly air by volume. That is what makes them stiff and light, and it also means a container fills up before it gets heavy. Freight per square metre on a long lane can rival the panel cost. Always ask whether a quote is ex-works or landed, because the difference is sometimes most of the price.
What a quote should include
Ask for four things on every quote: unit price, the thickness and grammage, whether the price is ex-works or landed, and the lead time. Panels are bulky relative to their weight and freight is a large share of a landed price on a long lane, so an ex-works figure is close to meaningless for comparison.
Also ask what happens to the price at a higher quantity. There are usually step changes where setup costs stop dominating, and knowing where they are changes what quantity is worth ordering. Sometimes ordering a few months of demand at once is cheaper than three smaller orders, even after storage.
What we can do
We supply PP honeycomb panels and quote against a proper specification. Send us size, thickness or span-and-load, quantity and destination, and we will come back with a landed figure and a trip-life estimate so you can compare properly – including against cheaper options if they suit the job better.