By John Richardson CHINA will become a country of a billion plus Western-style middle class consumers is what many people have been telling us for many years. Its unstoppable economic rise involves hundreds of millions more Chinese rising out of poverty as the economic boom moves steadily westwards into its poorer regions, is the popular […]
Asian Chemical Connections
US LLDPE imports threaten to overwhelm European market
By John Richardson THE above chart may end up being an underestimate of the extent to which US linear-low density polyethylene (LLDPE) gains further market share in Europe. But this chart is by itself bad enough. Here’s my logic behind the above chart. thanks to numbers from our our excellent ICIS Supply & Demand Database: […]
Per capita consumption another blunt tool for predicting China polymers growth
By John Richardson WE ALREADY know that forecasting Chinese polyethylene (PE) demand growth based on multiples of GDP doesn’t work. This is almost certainly the case with all the other polymers. As discussed last week, the problem starts with the forecasts for GDP growth. They will be inflated for political reasons. A new Brookings Institution […]
Risks for US petrochemicals once again rise as trade war takes another twist
By John Richardson JUST when nearly of all us (including me) thought that a trade deal was about to happen, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has thrown quite a large spanner in the works. “I can’t predict success at this point, but we’re working hard and we have made real progress,” he told a Senate […]
China’s January credit surge: Case for one-off panic, no new global economic boom
By John Richardson CHINA’S HUGE January credit increase might be the start of a new round of major credit-fuelled economic stimulus, was the theory I put forward last week. This would lead to a rebound in global growth and a surge in worldwide chemicals demand as global growth is about these three things: China, China […]
Search for votes in 2020 US presidential battleground states may wreck trade deal
By John Richardson A GOOD WAY of deciding whether or not the likely US/China trade deal will hold is to take a close look at the demographics in 15 potential battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. As of 2016, just ahead of the last presidential poll, David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report estimated […]
China’s dominant role in global PE demand just got even bigger
By John Richardson WE WERE already living in an incredibly lopsided PE world even before last year’s extraordinary rise in Chinese demand. Between 2009 and 2020 we had forecast that China would account for 25% of global PE consumption and 42% of global growth in demand. These percentages compared with just 16% of consumption and […]
US PE margins have further to fall on higher production, China weakness
By John Richardson THE WORST is over for the margin depletion that’s been experienced by US PE producers in Q4 2018 and likely in Q1 this year as well, I have heard it being argued. There are two problems with this view. Firstly, the worse can only be over if the Chinese economy bounces back. […]
Trade war dangers for US polyethylene re-emerge as talks appear to flounder
By John Richardson ONLY YESTERDAY just about everyone I spoke to in the polyethylene (PE) industry believed that the US and China would reach a trade deal by their 1 March deal. I agreed with them, although I kept cautioning during discussions that any trade deal would be paper thin […]
China slowdown threatens a million tonnes of lost styrene demand
By John Richardson CHINA’S apparent demand (*see note below) for styrene in 2018 looks set to have increased by just 2.5% over the previous year. This would be the lowest percentage growth and the smallest addition of new demand in tonnes since 2012. This would compare with our earlier estimate of real demand growth of […]