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Asian Chemical Connections

Dow And DuPont: How A Merger Could Work

By John Richardson DOW Chemical and DuPont are companies with tremendous histories. It is no exaggeration to say that they have helped to build the American economy, right from the early days of Henry Herbert Dow and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Their innovations have not only created wealth for America, their employees and their shareholders […]

What A “Low Growth World” Really Looks Like

By John Richardson ONLY six new  US crackers would be built over the next five years because of rising construction and labour costs, said Dow Chemical’s CEO, Andrew Liveris, in an earnings conference call last week. This would be out of the 12 crackers that have been announced (see the above table). Demand would therefore […]

Dow And Commodities-Specialities Integration

  By John Richardson IS diversification itself a problem in commodity chemicals and speciality companies with operations under one roof, or is it more how this diversification is handled? This is a question raised by this excellent Insight article, from the blog’s ICIS colleague Joe Chang, which revisits the issue of hedge fund Third Point’s […]

Dow Chemical And Back To The Future

By John Richardson HOW the world has changed. Dan Loeb of the Hedge fund, Third Point, wrote in a letter proposing a spin-off of Dow Chemical’s petrochemicals assets: “We suspect that Dow’s push downstream has led the company to use its upstream assets to subsidise certain downstream derivatives, either by sacrificing operational efficiency or making […]

Credit Tightening The Key For China In 2014

By John Richardson WE have been on a magical mystery tour during the second of half 2013 in an effort to discover what has really driven the 14% year-on-year increase in polyethylene (PE) apparent demand in China in January-August – the latest data that is available to us. Apparent demand is imports plus domestic production. […]

No Ethylene Margins Peak In 2016

  By John Richardson FORECASTS of European capacity closures and project delays and cancellations have led some financial analysts to the conclusion that there will be a peak in ethylene margins from 2016 onwards. This will provide a few years of very strong returns for the global industry before the big wave of US capacity […]

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