Asia and Europe prices drive March IPEX higher

LONDON (ICIS)–Higher prices in Europe and Asia helped lift the global ICIS Petrochemical Index (IPEX) for March by 6.1% from February, ICIS data showed on Thursday.

Petrochemical prices had been negotiated higher for March on the back of the fluctuating crude price and naphtha costs. The Asia IPEX rose most strongly in March, by 9.7% while the Europe IPEX was up 5.5%. The US IPEX was 0.4% higher based on the available data.

The regional IPEXs are calculated each month based on a basket of prices for 12 petrochemical products weighted by production capacity including olefins, aromatics and polymers.

The indexes dropped rapidly with falling crude from the end of August 2014 and have reflected the recovery of petrochemical prices over the past few weeks on earlier rising crude.

The global IPEX for the first quarter of 2015, however, is still down 22.1% on the index for the fourth quarter of 2014 and 34.9% lower than in the first quarter a year ago.

Prices in Asia for the major olefins and aromatics rose sharply and a proportion of the monomer increase was passed on in polyethylene and in polypropylene.

Aromatics prices in Europe were sharply higher with lesser proportional increases for the major olefins.

US aromatics prices were higher but propylene prices dropped as did prices for polypropylene.

Data for the March IPEX were extracted before the settlement of prices for ethylene, paraxylene, styrene and polyvinyl chloride in the US, paraxylene and styrene in Asia and PVC in Europe.

Published at the beginning of each month, the IPEX provides an independent indicator of average change in world petrochemical prices.

The IPEX product basket of 12 essential petrochemical products comprises ethylene, propylene, butadiene (BD), benzene, toluene, PX, styrene, methanol, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene (PE), polypropylene and polystyrene (PS).

Dating back to January 1993, historical ICIS prices for these products in the US, western Europe and northeast Asian markets have been weighted by regional nameplate capacity to generate the monthly index value.

Download global and regional ICIS IPEX data here
View the full IPEX methodology