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 […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Moving Beyond A World Of Myths: Steps One And Two
By John Richardson We are living in a world of myths that are at long last being exposed as such, although I worry that this could be too late for some chemicals companies. One myth I discussed yesterday is the idea that because Chinese consumption of petrochemicals is so much bigger than a decade ago, […]
China: There Are No Shortcuts To Recovery
By John Richardson STOCK markets can do what they want over the next few days and weeks. They will surely bounce around like crazy on every tiny detail of economic news from China. For example, yesterday there was a 3% recovery in London, a 4% rebound in Paris and Germany was up by 5% (but […]
US Petchems: Last Piece Of Expansion Logic Fades On Falling Crude
By John Richardson THE demand was simply never going to be there to support anywhere close to the number of US cracker and derivatives projects listed in the table above. There long been two reasons for this: The US is a mature market with no demand growth since 2000 in ethylene and the biggest-volume derivative […]
Surviving The Crisis Depends On How You React
By John Richardson PEOPLE make up chemicals companies – not just ever-more ingeniously assembled molecules. So how people react from now onwards will determine which companies survive and which companies fail in the New Normal. The people who are on the boards of the world’s chemicals companies need to tear up their strategies and start […]
Yuan Devaluation: Why, What It Means Now And What Is Next
By John Richardson Why did the yuan devaluation take place, and what happens now and over the next few months? Here is my take on yesterday’s announcement. Although this might not be the main motive behind a move that I predicted would happen in February of this year, a cheaper yuan will provide support for […]
China’s Economic Realities In Four Charts
I’ll be again posting less frequently this week – today, obviously, Wednesday and also on Friday – as I am on still on leave. The blog returns to normal from the week starting 27 July. By John Richardson SOME graphs are worth many thousands of words, and so here are four graphs to start […]
Selecting China’s Losers From Its Winners
By John Richardson WE know that: China’s Total Social Financing (TSF) was down by 18% in January-April 2015 on a year-on-year basis. TSF is the measure of total credit growth in the economy, from both the state-owned banks and the privately-run shadow-banking system. Lending from the state-controlled banks was up by just 14% as shadow […]
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 […]
China’s New “For Profit” Chemicals Industry? Think Again….
By John Richardson IF you think that running a chemicals company in China can be compared to running one in the West then please take a look at the above chart. This is an updated version of a chart Paul Hodges and I have run on Sinopec in the past, which includes the full-year 2014 […]
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