By John Richardson

THE blog is very busy in Singapore this week and so apologies for the reduced service today.

In short, and we will provide more details next week, we have held meetings with polyethylene (PE) traders and producers and they tell us:

1.)    Activity remains very weak with the majority of traders and end-users in China remaining on the sidelines.

2.)    The reason is that there has been a no strong recovery in domestic consumer demand, or in export orders for manufactured goods, which justifies the 13% rise in apparent PE demand (imports plus local production) in January-June. People simply don’t trust the accuracy of the data

3.)    Any recovery in pricing, and thus sales, is attributed to speculation and temporary tightness  in the market.