A happy festive season and all the best for the New Year to my readers. What should chemicals companies do to be successful in 2016 and beyond. What follows will help. I am taking a break from blogging, but will be back on 3 January. By John Richardson WHAT have we learnt from the last […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Polyethylene The “Last Man Standing”. For How Much Longer?
By John Richardson POLYETHYLENE (PE) remains almost the “last man standing”. Whereas most of the other chemicals and polymers markets in China, including phenol, polyvinyl chloride and purified terephthalic acid, are mired in almost vanished imports and poor profitability because of severe oversupply, PE appears to be fine. Take the latest import and local production […]
US Long-Term Interest Rates Tell The Real Economic Story
TEN-YEAR US TREASURY RATES UP UNTIL DECEMBER 15 2015 By John Richardson AN important article in the New York Times almost gets there, but like so much coverage out there, misses the crucial conclusion: Demographics drive demand and there is nothing that the Fed has done, or can do in the future, to alter this […]
Oil At $25 Or Even Lower By The End Of This Year
By John Richardson AS most people react like a rabbit caught in a car headlight to the latest collapse in crude-oil prices, they need to take note of this: The long term average price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is only $33 a barrel. Why were so many misled into thinking that the natural price […]
Dow and DuPont Need To Prove Sceptics Wrong
By John Richardson UNLESS you live on Mars, you will have obviously read about the ground-breaking climate change deal reached in Paris over the weekend. Sure, it will only come into force if 55 countries responsible for at least 55% of emissions ratify the deal. And we know that in the US in particular, given […]
Dow And DuPont: How A Merger Could Work
By John Richardson DOW Chemical and DuPont are companies with tremendous histories. It is no exaggeration to say that they have helped to build the American economy, right from the early days of Henry Herbert Dow and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Their innovations have not only created wealth for America, their employees and their shareholders […]
Autos Material Science: 180 Degree Change For Petchems
By John Richardson HERE is an example of how the links between the petrochemicals and polymers business and the autos industry have long worked: In the 1980s, propylene was a very low value co-product of naphtha and other liquids cracking. You always make around half a tonne of propylene for every one tonne of […]
Deflation Threatens Asia’s Ethylene-Polyethylene Link
By John Richardson AS you can see from the above chart, ever since April 1997, when we first started providing price quotes for spot Northeast Asian (NEA) high-density polyethylene (HDPE) film grade, it has been spot ethylene rather than spot naphtha prices that have driven HDPE prices. You can find the same pattern for any […]
China Will Continue To Drive Global Deflation
By John Richardson JANET Yellen has firmly signalled that US interest rates will be raised later this month for the first time since 2006. There will be collateral damage, sure, as I discussed in September, most importantly because of the private-sector debt binge in emerging markets resulting from such a long period of record-low US […]
Re-evaluating Investments In A Lower Margin World
By John Richardson BACK in January 2008, just about nobody thought that the shale-gas revolution would transform the economics of the US petrochemicals business. Then from around 2011 onwards came the new set-in-stone view: That this was an industry which virtually had a licence to print money for another 10-20 years. What do people now […]
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