Home Blogs Asian Chemical Connections

Asian Chemical Connections

The weird and not so wonderful world of biofuels

The petrochemicals industry generally gets a bad press, but producers are unlikely to ever be charged with depriving the public of food. In fact, plastic packaging could go a long way to solving problems such as India’s – where 40% of food rots before it can be delivered. Biofuels producers, however, although they have ostensibly […]

Reliance predicts a big India polymer deficit

The optimism seems infectious: Reliance’s market capitalisation breached the RS3 trillion level today, placing the giant in an elite group of only three Indian companies.And the petrochemicals major is predicting 12.59m tonnes of polymer demand in India in 2011-12 with local supply at slightly below 8m tonnes/year. The forecast big deficit is based on a […]

Will Japan’s rate rise do any good?

The Bank of Japan has decided to raise interest rates – from 0.25 to 0.5%. This could weaken the yen, thereby damaging the country’s export-led recovery. For the petrochemical players, the benefits of a 21-year low yen have been offset by the increased cost of importing naphtha. The bank is also banking on last summer’s […]

Japan is still in search of a consumer recovery

Japan’s fourth quarter GPD growth of 4.8%, which was released today, exceeded economists’ expectations. However, although consumer spending rose by 1.1% on an annualised basis, this merely compensated for the 1.1% decline in Q3. In addition, wages rose by only 0.2% last year, barely up from a decade-long decline. Companies are preferring to pay down […]

Is global warming a load of hogwash?

I am involved in this running email debate with the only person I know who is as stubborn and as pig-headed as myself – my old schoolmate in the UK. He is convinced that global warming is indeed a load of hogwash and has evidence to support his theory in this series of articles from […]

How To Get Rid Of Management Consultants

Fed up with receiving those obscenely large bills from trendy management consultants populated by wet-behind-the-ears Harvard graduates? Ever thought that a great deal of commonsense is all you need to run a business rather than theoretical nonsense? These guys, as the Financial Times reveals in its article about the Japanese mob, have restructured without the […]

Jump to page: