By John RichardsonEVIDENCE that China is no longer acting as the growth engine of the world, because it is too busy dealing with internal adjustments, is mounting. For example, on Tuesday of this week Taiwan announced that its year-on-year Q1...
By John Richardson THERE is a one in three chance of China's real GDP growth averaging 5% or less over four consecutive quarters before the end of 2014, warns Nomura, said Bloomberg in this article. And the bank added that...
By John Richardson ONE of Sinopec's subsidiaries, Shanghai Petrochemical, has weighed-in to the debate over US shale gas by warning that cheap petrochemicals imports from the States could erode the whole of China's competitiveness. "We can't tell how severe the...
Source of chart: http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/ By John Richardson THERE has been a hugely important shift in the attitude of China's central government. In the old days, when they set a target of say 12% national industrial production growth for...
By John Richardson THERE will, of course, be bright spots in petrochemicals markets as a result of factors independent of China's new economic direction. For example, as an aromatics trader points out, there are huge paraxylene (PX) capacity additions in...
By John Richardson CHINA has to improve innovation if it is to avoid the middle-income trap. Some people assume that success is a given because of China's great achievement of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty...
Chart compiled by the China Real Time Report blog. By John Richardson NOBODY should be surprised about what is happening in China's petrochemicals markets, as the signs have been there for many months that economic rebalancing would have...
Source of picture: China Daily By John Richardson The famous investor, Jim Chanos, warned three years years ago that the West places an inordinate amount of trust in "nine guys in a room" (i.e. China's Politburo Standing Committee) getting...
China's National People's Congress Source of picture: Rex Features By John Richardson The focus of next week's National People's Congress (NPC) meeting in China - the country's annual "parliamentary" meeting - is likely to be on the quality...
By John Richardson POLYETHYLENE (PE) prices crept up by $10-50/tonne for the week ending 22 February, according to ICIS pricing. But, as the above chart shows, integrated high-density PE variable cost margins in Southeast and Northeast Asia remained very weak,...
By John Richardson YET more problems with Chinese economic statistics have emerged, casting doubt over the idea that an economic hard landing was avoided in 2012 - and that there was a strong rebound in the fourth quarter. "Official data...
By John Richardson A NEW report from HSBC backs up our concerns that the post-Chinese New Year polyethylene (PE) will be weaker than in December-January. The bank is with us in thinking that the stronger markets over the last two...
By John Richardson THE consensus view is that Chinese growth will be fine at the very least for the first half of this year, and possibly for the whole of 2013, thanks to all the money still sloshing around the...
By John Richardson THE above chart shows that China's polyethylene (PE) demand growth has been well below that of overall GDP for most of the years between 2006 and 2012. This supports the argument that economic growth has been too...
Source of picture: Imaginechina/Rex Feature By John Richardson ONE can interpret last week's release of January purchasing manager's indices for January just about any way you like. Thus, Reuters wrote on 2 February: "China's official PMI released by...
By John Richardson THE overall HSBC flash purchasing managers' index for January, which was released yesterday, was at a two-year high (see the above chart), with the sub-index of production at a 22-month high. This is great news for equity values...
By John Richardson IN the best of all possible worlds, more than a billion people in the emerging markets will become a great deal richer over the next few decades. As a result, they will be able to much more...
By John Richardson CHINA'S new local currency lending rose to 703.9 billion Yuan ($111 billion) last month, way ahead of July's 540.1 billion Yuan. If a you are trader in the Dalian Commodity Exchange's futures contract in linear-low density (LLDPE)...
By John RichardsonHere is the first of a three blog posts on what is happening in China's polyolefins markets. Today, we look at the Middle East and tomorrow and Thursday we present the perspective of traders and Western-headquartered...
By John Richardson THE possibility that China's economy may not expand as rapidly in the future as in the past is never discussed in public by resources-company CEOs, said an Australian-based stockbroker. His comments ring true for petrochemicals, also. The...
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