Home Blogs Asian Chemical Connections

Asian Chemical Connections

China Credit Growth Lowest Since 2005

By John Richardson CHINA’S polyolefins markets have picked up over the last few weeks on reports of tighter supply. For example, there are no less than 15 turnarounds taking place in China between March and June. This involves the shutdown of 2.61m tonnes of polyethylene (PE) capacity and 1.63m tonnes of polypropylene (PP) capacity on […]

The Petronas Decision And Singapore

By John Richardson THE blog continues to ponder the significance of the Petronas announcement that it is to go ahead with its $27bn refinery-petrochemicals project – the Pengerang Integrated Complex (PIC) at Johor in Malaysia. “It means that Singapore faces a competitor with deep pockets. Time to assess the winners and losers on Singapore’s Jurong […]

China Turns A Corner On Shale Gas

By John Richardson CHINA has more shale gas reserves than the US, and, like the US six years ago, confronts a dangerous reliance on imported energy. But the development of the shale industry in China is being hampered by water shortages,  poor intellectual property rights protection leading to lack of access to cutting edge US […]

Poverty Alleviation Matters More Than GDP

By John Richardson RICH people, relatively speaking, don’t buy that many chemicals and polymers – hence, poverty reduction matters from a dollars and cents as well as a moral perspective. Thus, a report released this week by the Asian Development Bank, Support for Inclusive Growth, makes for very disturbing reading. David Pilling from the FT, […]

The Petronas Decision: What It Means

By John Richardson LAST week’s decision by Petronas to go ahead with its $27bn refinery and petrochemicals complex at Pengerang in Johor, Malaysia, tells us that: Nation building remains important in the petrochemicals business. This project will create huge further economic value for Malaysia through all the construction and operating jobs created and the revenues […]

China Identifies The Smart People

By John Richardson CHINA’S government, via a very important statement on the state-run newswire Xinhua, have identified the smart people. They are those who have already realised that China is not going to “blink”. There will be no big new economic stimulus package and the measures to stabilise growth, that were announced last week, were […]

US Shale Gas: Demand Is The Thing

By John Richardson Here is one way of looking at the shale gas industry in the US from a March Oxford Economics Report: While most of the companies that have made write-downs are not quitting, many players in this industry have already noted that the revolution is not as technically and financially attractive as they […]

China’s SMEs, Good And Bad, Under Threat

By John Richardson THE cosy relationship between the state-run banks and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has long held back economic rebalancing, but wasn’t a critical problem for small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) when official lending tripled in 2009 (have a look at the chart on polypropylene in this post, which illustrates the impact). There was, of course, plenty of […]

US Petchems Risk Getting Only One Cookie

By John Richardson WALTER Mischel, the psychologist, carried out an experiment on four-year-old children in the late 1960s. “They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo cookie), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait for 15 minutes under difficult conditions,” […]

China’s New Stimulus Package: What It Means For Chemicals

By John Richardson CHINA’S petrochemicals markets are likely to enjoy a confidence rally as a result of yesterday’s announcement of a mini economic stimulus package. The details of the stimulus package include: More railway construction.  The State Council released plans on Wednesday to sell $24 billion US of bonds this year to build railways in […]

Jump to page: