By John Richardson A PERTH-based businessman who made a very basic piece equipment for the Australian mining industry (details disguised for confidentiality reasons) incurred total production costs of just Aus$6 for each item he produced as a against a sale price of Aus$60 a time. Yes, this is not printing mistake – Aus$60! Quite […]
Asian Chemical Connections
China Export And Import Data May Obscure The Real Picture
By John Richardson CONFUSED? Perhaps, as was definitely the case last Friday, you shouldn’t be. The thrilled reaction of financial markets to the release of China’s July export and import data needs to be put into the context of it being one positive set of data in a long-running series of negative data. On the […]
Australia Misses China Slowdown, Faces Aus$33bn Writedown
By John Richardson THE blog was amazed over the weekend when it discovered that the country’s governing Labor Party has had to write down Aus$33.3bn in budget revenues in the space of just ten weeks, largely because it failed to forecast the extent of the slowdown in China. Australia, as a major resources exporter is, […]
Asian Demographics Change Demand Patterns
THIS blog was once criticised for devoting too much time to the big picture – e.g. politics, economics and demographics – one of the major themes of our free e-book, Boom, Gloom & The New Normal. We beg to differ. While studying chemical-plant operating rates, new capacities, feedstock advantages and logistics etc are, of course, […]
The Best Of All Possible Worlds
Source of graph: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/ By John Richardson “Candide, the classic novel of the great French writer Voltaire, is a satirical description of a young man who has been taught that ‘everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’,” wrote Paul Hodges in this blog post last week. Thus, we have […]
Multiple Energy Options In China
Source of table: The Economist By John Richardson WHEN you are an energy giant such as Shell you can afford to explore multiple avenues in an effort to profit from China’s long-term energy needs. Thus Shell re-affirmed last week that it plans to invest $1bn in a year in exploiting the country’s vast shale-gas […]
Energy, Politics & Economics
Source of graph: http://thinkprogress.org/ By John Richardson DANIEL Yergin’s superb book, The Prize, describes how the history of the 20th century was shaped by oil and gas. Now we are entering a new era. Some 600,000 jobs have already been created by the US shale and oil gas revolutions, leading to hopes of […]
China’s Demographic Crisis
Chinese govt poster promoting the one-child policy By John Richardson IF all you can remember is strong emerging markets growth, then it is easy to be misled into only building into your scenarios the notion that China and India are merely pausing for economic breath. Conventional wisdom remains that this is, decidedly, the […]
Feedstock Assumptions A Risk
By John Richardson THE feedstock landscape can change very rapidly as the shale-gas revolution amply demonstrates. But the assumption, right now, is that the landscape will not undergo any further radical changes. As a result, as much as 7.65m tonne/year could be added to US ethylene capacity by 2017. That would represent a 29 percent […]
PE Middle East Offers Keep Falling
By John Richardson POLYOLEFIN markets are not going to bottom out until August-September at the earliest, according to several producers and traders who the blog spoke to yesterday. And even if prices do eventually stop declining, confidence has all but disappeared that there will be any substantial recovery in either pricing or demand for the […]
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