By John Richardson I SEE three Scenarios for Chinese economic growth, and so of course petrochemicals demand growth, in 2018-2025. See below where I detail how these three Scenarios would affect growth in demand for polypropylene (PP). But first of all, let’s deal with the issue of the 19th National Party Congress meeting, which begins […]
Asian Chemical Connections
China To Now Raise Ethylene Capacity By 84% As Self-Sufficiency Drive Accelerates
By John Richardson SINCE my last update on 18 September, our ICIS China team have discovered a further 2.4m tonnes/year of ethylene capacity being planned in China via the steam cracker process (see the updated table above, with the changes from September indicated in red). There will also of course be more propylene via steam […]
China Puts Environment Ahead Of GDP As Chemicals Shortages Build
By John Richardson FURTHER evidence has emerged of the Chinese government’s determination to deal with an air pollution crisis that a new study says shortens life spans in China by three years . Local government officials have long been measured by how rapidly they expand GDP growth. But in a quite stunning reversal of policy, Beijing has […]
Climate Change, Extreme Weather: Implications For Chemicals Companies
By John Richardson The greater frequency of extreme weather events presents a huge challenge for chemicals companies. Take Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma as the most obvious current examples. Weather forecasting service AccuWeather writes in this article: This is the first time in the history of record keeping that two Category 4 or higher hurricanes, […]
China PP Demand Surprises On The Upside, But Oil Threat Remains
By John Richardson CHINA’S PP market, provided oil prices don’t further collapse, seems to be pretty close to the end of a destocking cycle that stretches back to February of this year, when the post-Lunar New Year traditional surge in new import orders didn’t happen. The reason is a further fall in net imports (imports minus […]
Deflation, Customer Cost Cutting And Polyolefins
By John Richardson MOST of the world’s top ten chemicals producers reported lower sales for Q3 2015, but saw their profits improve on lower oil prices. Sticking to the sector which I follow closely, which is polyolefins, this is down to a “lag effect”. The collapse of oil and so naphtha costs has not being […]
How China Will Narrow Its Income Gap
By John Richardson THE above chart is part of China’s New Normal, and so helps us to understand the future of the country’s chemicals and polymers supply and demand balances. As you can see, the gap between its richest and poorest provinces remains substantial despite some progress in narrowing this gap since 2002. The success […]
China’s Polyolefins Recovery On Shaky Ground
By John Richardson CHINA’S polyolefins markets were in a muddle last week as a result of resilient offer prices for imported material versus a fall in pricing for domestic cargoes. Domestic polyethylene (PE) prices were largely softer, but local distributors were unwilling to significantly cut their offer prices for imported because of tight supply across […]
China’s Polypropylene Imports: The Balance Of Probabilities
CHINA’S polypropylene (PP) imports increased by 11.3% in January-April of this year compared with the same period in 2013, according to the latest available China customs data. There could be lots of reasons for this. One reason might be that the fairly subdued tone of just about everybody you speak to in markets is wrong […]
The Hedgehog And The Fox
By John Richardson Are there more hedgehogs in the chemicals industry than foxes? This thought came to the blog after meetings with industry executives this week during its latest visit to Singapore. Bear with us and we will, we promise, as quickly as possible get to the point. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in his famous […]
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