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Asian Chemical Connections

Costly Oil Hurts US Industry

  By John Richardson  THE higher that oil prices go the more the US petrochemical industry’s margins have expanded. Petrochemical prices are oil-driven and, therefore, have to go higher as crude becomes more expensive, whereas the cost of shale gas-based ethane keeps on falling due to rising supply. US petrochemical producers are cracking increasing amounts of […]

China And Inflation

By John Richardson MUCH excitement heralded the announcement that February inflation in China had fallen to a 20-month low of 3.2 percent – well within the government’s annualised target of 4 percent. This led to the belief that the government would boost bank lending, and maybe further low bank-reserve requirements and interest rates. No doubt this […]

China Power Woes Hit Chem Output

By Malini Hariharan and John Richardson The power crisis in China, highlighted in this post last month and yesterday, has worsened and is likely to affect economic output in the second quarter. More than 10 provinces, including Zhejiang, Hunan, Anhui, Jiangsu, Hubei, Sichuan and Henan, have been affected. Small and medium-sized petrochemical producers in the […]

Petchems Could Enjoy Abundant Naphtha

By John Richardson THE refining industry enjoyed a golden era before the global economic crisis thanks to a booming economy and gasoline shortages caused by Hurricane Katrina. Inevitably, therefore, as is so often the case with commodity industries, too much new capacity was planned that came on-stream at the worst possible time. But recently some […]

China Economic Hype And Crude Oil

Let’s catch the bus from now on….  Source of picture: hybridcars.com   By John Richardson THE blog has long been worried about the difficulty, probably the impossibility, of accurately measuring real Chinese growth. And it gets harder as the country now has some 130,000 polyolefin traders and distributors, according to an estimate we heard last […]

Should Indonesia Add Capacity?

      Source of picture: wartakota.co.id   WESTERNERS can often by unbelievably patronising about Asia’s efforts to climb up the economic self-sufficiency ladder. “South Korea has no business being in petrochemicals,” said a very annoying US industry executive many years ago – one of those situations where your correspondent wanted to punch someone’s lights […]

The Grim Reaper readies himself

See below for an extended analysis of why everything is about to go wrong. Looking forward to picking up some bargain chemical shares over the next two years and some cheap US and UK property! As the Asian head of M&A and acqusitions for a major bank told me this morning: “Wnen everyone tells me […]

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