By John Richardson IT HAS been evident since as early as February this year that China’s economy is slowing down. But once again, as in 2014, companies and investors have overlooked the key indicator of a slowdown: The sharp decline in credit availability, particularly via China’s shadow banking system. “Not to worry,” I can hear […]
Asian Chemical Connections
G20 trade deal is no deal unless a huge gap can be bridged
By John Richardson I PREDICTED that there could well be warm smiles, handshakes and some kind of trade deal at this weekend’s meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi. But I added that the devil would be in the detail. The detail tells us that nothing has been agreed other than what Steve Okun of McLarty […]
Complacency, LLDPE and plastic waste: A collapse in demand
By John Richardson THE TECHNICAL people, those with PHDs in polymer science who have also spent years in application development work, will tell you it is simply impossible to find other materials that perform as well as LLDPE. Multi-layer LLDPE films are vital in applications such as wrapping food, they argue, thanks to excellent barrier properties. […]
Iran-China PE trade and the sanctions: short term dip but long term big increase
By John Richardson IRANIAN exports of PE to China will likely suffer a temporary decline because of financing and logistics problems resulting from the new US sanctions against Iran. The US dollar now needs to be entirely avoided with trade needing to migrate to the yuan, the euro and other currencies. And as my ICIS […]
Polymers industry risks sleepwalking into sustainability crisis
GLOBALLY some 75% of aluminium is recycled, 86% of steel and 40% of glass. Why shouldn’t the same levels of recycling eventually apply to some polymers? A good example here is HDPE which is already the second easiest polymer to recycle after PET resins. As sustainability pressures build on the polymers industry, it seems reasonable to assume […]
Don’t Forget Turkey And Its Importance To Global Polyolefins
By John Richardson YOU might well have forgotten the Turkish lira crisis because of the US/China trade war. But Turkey is crucial for the health of the global polyolefins business because of the size of its imports. Before the US fell out with Turkey, resulting in the collapse of the lira, we had expected that […]
Plastics Rubbish Crisis: How To Pick The Winning Polymer Producers
By John Richardson IT IS FIVE years from now. You are rich because you live in the developed world. It is first thing in the morning. You take your rubbish (or trash as the Americans say) into you backyard and place it in a series of bins where you separate not only recycled from non-recycled […]
Turkey Crisis: Implications For Polyolefins And Global Economy
By John Richardson THE first ramification of the Turkey crisis is that the collapse of the lira raises questions over how Turkish importers will be able to afford the dollars to pay for some of the polyolefins imported since the crisis began. Then comes the issue of what happens to Turkish polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene […]
The Three Essential Oil Price, Economic Growth Scenarios For Petchems
By John Richardson ALL the excitement over the positive impact of US tax cuts should be placed very firmly in this context from an early July Reuters article: US budget analysts generally look at the impact of tax changes over a ten-year period. The tax cuts approved at the end of 2017 were estimated to […]
Why China Will Rapidly Become Paraxylene Self-Sufficient
By John Richardson WOW, what an opportunity. That might be your reaction to the two above charts. On the left, you can see a quite breath taking rise in China’s paraxylene (PX) net imports (imports minus exports). In 2007, China’s net imports were around 2.6m tonnes of PX with last year’s total reaching 14.4m tonnes. […]