Buyers’ confidence in business conditions falls in December – CMCI

Mark Victory

05-Jan-2017

LONDON (ICIS)–European chemical buyers’ confidence in current and future business conditions has fallen in the past month, analysis of the ICIS Chemical Market Confidence Index (CMCI) showed on Thursday.

CMCI Buyer Dec

This is likely linked to a raft of building block chemical price increases at the close of 2016 causing profitability concerns – views on current profitability compared with 12 months ago also saw a marginal fall.

Nevertheless, buyers remain largely positive across the bulk of indicators both current and future, with only current profitability negative on the overall index.

Views on current and future order book volumes, continued to increase – supported by the ongoing resilience of key downstream industries such as automotive – and confidence in future profitability also rose in December.

ICIS is considering changing the methodology of the CMCI from January to track future expectations 6 months ahead instead of 12 months ahead. If you have any views on this, please contact Mark Victory at mark.victory@icis.com.

The 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

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