By John Richardson THE average-paid worker in a US company has to work for more than a month to earn what her or his CEO will earn in just one hour, according to this video from Adam Mordecai – the social and political commentator. And in 2012, the richest 1% of the population took home […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Searching For A Manufacturing Revival
By John Richardson WALK into any airport bookshop and you will see shelf after shelf full of management and “get rich quick” books. How many books are you likely to see on inventing things and manufacturing? Hardly any….. The danger is that whilst we busy ourselves with pouring spurious knowledge into our heads about how […]
Grangemouth Viewed Through A Wider Lens
By John Richardson THROUGH the narrow lens of stand-alone cost competitiveness, the threatened refinery and petrochemicals complex in Grangemouth, Scotland the UK, (see picture) can be viewed as having a very questionable long-term future. For example, Britain’s refineries are viewed as small, old and lacking in sophistication. And it can be argued that they are […]
Global Petchem Markets Turn Bearish
By John Richardson EXCESSIVE inventory building down all the major petrochemical value chains is a global rather than just a Chinese problem, according to Paul Satchell – the UK-based chemicals analyst with global investment bank Canaccord Genuity in his latest Volume Proxy research note. “The Volume Proxy continues to decline, with the index now in clear […]
European Demographics Challenge US Export Assumptions
By John Richardson US feedstock advantages appear to provide an almost overwhelming case for a big wave of cracker and downstream investments, particularly in polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). In contrast, Europe is struggling with much-higher feedstock costs and low economic growth, resulting in the possibility of many more capacity closures. Only last week, for […]
Germany’s Long-term Economic Challenges
Source of graph: Eurostat By John Richardson AS delegates gather for this year’s European Petrochemical Association (EPCA) meeting in Berlin, which takes place on 5-9 October, it might be tempting to believe that Europe has turned the corner. Supporting this argument has been the release of lots of positive economy data recently. For example, […]
Europe’s Economic “Recovery”
By John Richardson EUROZONE GDP expanded 0.3% in the second quarter of this year and it will probably also have expanded in Q3. As a result, if you view the end of a recession as two consecutive quarters of positive growth, the champagne corks should perhaps be popping. Europe’s politicians have seized on the […]
China And The New IPCC Report
By John Richardson THE blog isn’t a scientist and it has also often discussed the dangers of another consensus view: That the global economy will return to the Old Normal. Nevertheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now said that there is a 95% chance that human activity is causing climate change, drawing […]
Generic Strategies No Longer Good Enough
By John Richardson DURING the economic Supercycle life was easy for chemicals companies. Strong and constant demand growth was assured and so all they had to do was focus on building new, cost-effective capacity. Top-down strategy was generic – a one-size-fits-all approach. Even if chemicals companies got the timing of new capacities slightly wrong it […]
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 […]
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