Standing in the queue for Starbucks (not McDonalds – no way, and my son’s going nowhere near that place) it’s so easy to opt for the half bucket-sized Grande option because, after all, we are all rich these days and anyway it costs hardly anything to “Upsize”. Walk around Starbucks and you’ll notice numerous Grande […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Is the elephant about to fall off the bike?
As Paul Hodges notes in his Chemicals and the Economy blog https://www.icis.com/blogs/chemicals%2Dand%2Dthe%2Deconomy/, China’s Finance Minister quit this morning – either over his role in a sex scandal or because inflation and the stock markets are out of control. Petrochemical demand growth has been booming in China because, as a bureaucrat put it shortly after WTO […]
Bad luck always comes in threes and this is 2007!
Last night I was feeling a little mellow after consuming far too much ethanol (the French variety – a very reasonable bottle of Cotes du Rhone) when the idiots on CNBC began to rant on about this being 2007, which explained why were in the midst of potentially a global financial meltdown. There was the […]
The global credit crisis is going to last
The collective sigh of relief was almost audible late last week when the Fed cut its discount rate – the rate banks charge each other for lending. Action from other central banks, including the European Central Bank, could follow this week. Analysts also rate the likelihood of the Fed cutting its formal interest rate at […]
Construction crisis? What crisis? China leads the way
As the Middle East struggles to find labour and raw material supply with contractors’ order books bursting at the seams, the Chinese seem to have no difficulty in executing their projects. See below for detailed analysis of what’s happening with the current wave of Chinese crackers. Suffice to say here that nearly all of China’s […]
China attempts to move up the value chain
Petrochemical markets are being badly ruffled by two recent Chinese government decisions. In late June, there was the decision to change the VAT export rebate system for yuan-priced product. And then this week there was a widening of the deposit rules governing import duty and VAT rebates on petchem imports priced in US dollars. But […]
China’s crackers are on track. Is this bad news?
The consultants, traders and producers I spoke to last week insist that the current wave of new Chinese ethylene capacity due on stream in the current Five-Year Plan (2006-10), Download file is more or less on track to be completed on schedule. Also see on these slides the ICIS insight Asia list of crackers after […]
Is ExxonMobil taking a gamble?
Will China relax the price controls that have led to wallopping great losses for domestic refiners, thereby justifying ExxonMobil’s Fujian investment? As we can see from this Bloomberg article, Exxon is pinning many of its hopes on these controls being relaxed. Does the US giant know something we don’t or are they taking a punt? […]
Oops a daisy, here we go again
A boring topic to harp on about again I know, but this article from my colleague Nigel Davis from the Insight section of ICIS news supports what I have been saying for the past two years. The industry has overbuilt, and despite all the optimism engendered by project delays and probably cancellations in Iran of […]
What’s the point in building a plant if you’ve got nobody to run it?
No point obviously. As this report from Deutsche Bank Download file notes, the global skills shortage is not just in the west. In the engineering sector, and perhaps this applies to petrochemicals, Deutsche Bank claims that the huge outpouring of Indian and Chinese graduates is grossly exaggerated; and it adds that the quality of graduates […]
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