Europe chem producers mostly optimistic despite Brexit vote – July CMCI

LONDON (ICIS)–European producers remain mostly optimistic over future profitabilty, business conditions and order book volumes despite economic uncertainty following the UK’s referendum vote to leave the EU, analysis of the July ICIS Chemical Market Confidence Index (CMCI) showed on Tuesday.

Producers, however, were negative over current business conditions when compared to the past 12 months, with that indicator moving down sharply to take it into negative territory from a positive reading in June.

Confidence was also weak concerning current profitability which was also down, moving further into the red from last month.  

July saw the first full CMCI conducted since the UK’s vote to leave the EU, with the June data collected the week of the vote, making it impossible to tell the impact until now.

The newly established ICIS Europe CMCI aggregates sentiment from hundreds of petrochemical market players actively involved in price negotiations across more than 60 different markets.

The Europe CMCI runs from +100, to -100, with zero on each index representing neutral, or uncertain conditions, a negative score indicating bearish expectations and a positive score representing bullish expectations. The indices also gather sentiment on the comparison between the current situation and the situation across the past 12 months to give a complete picture of current market conditions and confidence. The information is gathered in the third week of each month.  A full methodology is available on request.

For more details on the overall Europe CMCI data, click here