LAST WEEK I challenged whether the longstanding “put option” for petrochemicals companies and investors would still apply to China 2022.
The put option rests on the well-proven notion that the worst things get in the short term, the better the immediate outlook because Beijing always rides to the rescue with big economic stimulus.
The challenge I posed to the put option was that China might only tinker around the edges of its Common Prosperity economic reforms.
By John Richardson AS OF yesterday, around 70% of US paraxylene capacity was offline. No less than 67% of US ethylene capacity and 14% of benzene capacity had been impacted by the severe winter weather, meaning of course that US styrene monomer (SM) output will have also been severely curtailed. I could go on, covering […]
By John Richardson THE THING is, as I discussed in my 9 February blog post, we simply do not have our hands on the data. Unless we improve our access to data, and greatly ramp up our ability to process and analyse the numbers, the petrochemicals industry will remain largely in the dark on demand. […]
This is the first of a series of blog posts where I will examine the environmental paradigm shift and what it means for the petrochemicals industry. This first post deals with the bottom end of the value chain, the plastic packaging business, and the pressure being exerted upward on petrochemicals producers to change how they […]
THE CENTRAL character of The Big Short was the only person who bothered to read the detail of US mortgage debt securities that were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis. All of us course now know that these securities were built on sub-prime debt that went wrong and almost caused the collapse of the global […]
By John Richardson THE above map global shows our base-case forecasts for global trade flows of HDPE, LLDPE and PP in 2025. It is the result of lots of hard work and smart thinking around feedstock costs, logistics costs and demand growth etc. and is a good start to your scenario planning process. The map […]
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 […]
By John Richardson HERE are a few important facts about polyethylene (PE): China accounted for 30%, or 2.35m tonnes , of global imports of linear low-density PE (LLDPE) in 2013 (see the above chart). It accounted for 43% of high-density (HDPE) imports. This represented 4.73m tonnes of shipments to China. And in the case of […]
By John Richardson THE blog has a terrible confession to make: We sometimes get it very badly wrong. How’s that for modesty? A couple of months ago we got it very badly wrong when we kept waffling on and on, in post after post, about whether China would hit GDP growth of 3-4%, 5%, 6% […]
CHINA’S president Xi Jinping, in a landmark speech at the weekend, talked about the “New Normal” of lower economic growth and a different type of growth altogether. He qualified this different type of growth as follows: “Through innovation and technological development, the country should push for the transformation from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in […]
