By John Richardson IT is just silly, the idea that India can become an export-based heavy manufacturing powerhouse to rival China. Here are four very good reasons why this cannot happen: China, despite its rising labour costs in its eastern provinces, has vast supply chain advantages and far superior infrastructure which keeps getting better and […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Asia’s Ageing Populations: Challenges And Opportunities
By John Richardson EVERYONE should know by now that China faces a demographic crisis that, unless addressed, guarantees much lower GDP growth for many years to come. This explains the urgency of economic reforms designed to escape the “middle income trap”. But here are some disturbing statistics from the Asian Development Bank about other countries in […]
Narendra Modi: Revisiting The “Toilet Test”
By John Richardson LAST year I set India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi a “toilet test: Would he be able to fulfil his promise of giving every Indian access to a toilet by 2019? I should have actually qualified this question by pointing out that access wasn’t enough, but instead has to be accompanied by a […]
Fed Rate Rise And Indonesia: You Should Be “Shock Proof”
By John Richardson AS you waited for your flight, you picked up a nice glossy magazine that talked about the “Asian economic miracle” in the kind of one-dimensional language that might have got some of you into this mess in the first place. You then returned to your chemicals company to read report after report […]
The Hypnotic Allure Of Emerging Markets
By John Richardson A GLEAMING new skyscraper in downturn Beijing, Bangkok, Mumbai, Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur made for fantastic TV viewing, especially if a photogenic reporter was standing in front of such a building. The reporter would then talk about “Asia’s rising middle classes” as the camera panned-out to people queueing outside Louis Viton and Cartier […]
Serving The Needs Of The Vulnerable Poor Majority
By John Richardson HERE is another way of looking at the important new Pew Research study, which I first wrote about last Friday: Just 16% of the world’s population live on incomes that would take them safely above the poverty line in the US in 2011 – the latest year for which all the global […]
Supply Exceptionally Tight, But Real Demand Still Struggles
By John Richardson WHAT a fantastic year it has so far been for margins, with the chart above showing how in one grade of polyethylene (PE), Northeast Asia (NEA) and European producers are really, really cashing in. The same applies across many others grades of both PE and polypropylene (PP). In Northeast Asia, one of […]
The Developing World: Getting Your Strategy Right
By John Richardson IT IS just plain intellectually lazy, and, more importantly, very wrong indeed: You work for a petrochemicals company and have been asked by your boss to come up with a demand-growth estimate for the next ten years for the rest of the developing world, and so you look at what’s happened in […]
Ageing Populations And Fitting Two Billion Into One Billion
By John Richardson THE above chart is of absolutely critical importance for anybody who is serious about estimating both the strength and nature of future global demand growth for chemicals. If you are not a serious analysts then, sure, ignore demographics and cling on to a few vacuous slogans such as the “rise of the […]
Africa: How To Seize Another Opportunity
By John Richardson WHEN you’ve finished renegotiating with your lenders, your shareholders and your bondholders about what the collapse of oil prices means for your chemicals company, you will, hopefully, have a strategy to come through this crisis more or less in one piece. The next stage is, of course, the implementation of the new […]
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