By John Richardson ONLINE SALES accounted for 19% of all retail sales in seven industrialised countries in 2020, up from 16% the year before, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Year-on-year online sales growth numbers by country in 2020 included 59% in Australia, 46.7% in Britain and 14.6% […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Petrochemicals markets complexity is only going to grow and grow
By John Richardson NICE WORK, if you get can get it. A trucking company in Fort Worth, Texas, is offering to pay experienced drivers $14,000 a week – $728,000 a year – as the US struggles with a nationwide shortage of truckers or lorry drivers. This reminds me of perhaps an apocryphal tale, from the […]
Complexity of global PP demand post-pandemic: Three new scenarios for 2021-2025
By John Richardson THE COMPLEXITY of the economic outlook is such that nobody can say with even the smallest degree of genuine confidence what will happen to global petrochemicals and polymers demand over the next five years. It is hard to know where to start in suggesting scenarios of how the interconnections between today’s four […]
US and China: Intellectual property rights and maybe some historical amnesia
By John Richardson THE SMARTPHONE is a wonderful invention as it allows easy mobile access to the internet for many small businesses. Accounts can be updated and invoices sent on the go when builders, plumbers and bricklayers are between jobs, say my friends who are in these trades in Perth, Western Australia. Also think of […]
China Lending Bubble Adds 4.7m Tonnes To Polyethylene Consumption
By John Richardson THE IMF produced a very interesting study earlier this month, in which it estimated that if it had not been for China’s giant economic stimulus programme the country’s real GDP growth would have averaged only 5.3% per annum during the five years to 2016. Instead, however, the IMF estimates that China’s economy […]
Climate Change: Taking Out An Insurance Policy
By John Richardson WOULD you get on board a plane without taking out travel insurance to protect your family? Of course not, even though the chances of you being involved in a plane crash are one in 9 million. And would you step into an ocean where dangerous sharks swim, especially if you live where […]
Rudderless Australia Drifts On
By John Richardson THERE used to be two certainties in life that everyone in Australia could depend on. We all know that the first certainty was, and sadly still is, death. But the second certainty was China acting as the “bankroller” of the Australian economy. This has all but vanished since late 2013. The second […]
Australia: This Is No Way To Run A Country
By John Richardson TONY Abbott has survived an attempt to remove him as Australia’s Prime Minister. Do you really think this will bring to an end the political instability that has resulted in four changes in PM since 2007? This really is a rhetorical question because anybody who lives and works in Australia, as I do, […]
Too Late For Iron Ore, But Not For Petrochemicals
By John Richardson YOU might be familiar with the phrase “putting all your eggs in one basket”. It is the kind of phrase that you learn at your mother’s knee, and yet CEOS seem to have forgotten what they were surely taught from a very early age. The chart below should take your breath away. It […]
Iron Ore and Petrochemicals Share The Same Delusions
By John Richardson BACK in January we wrote: “As China’s investment growth model is unwound – for economic as well as social reasons – iron ore prices [will] decline significantly, leading to the failure of the smaller mining companies and some of the service providers. This could happen just as a lot more iron-ore supply […]