By John Richardson POLYMER BUYERS outside northeast (NEA) and southeast Asia (SEA) have a big opportunity to save millions of dollars on procurement costs during the rest of this year through purchasing more from the two regions. The opportunity has arisen because I believe that NEA and SEA polymer prices will remain very cheap relative […]
Asian Chemical Connections
More data show how far we still have to go to solve the climate and plastic waste crises
By John Richardson SEE THE END section of this blog post for a dystopian version of our environmental future. In a follow-up post – which I will publish on Thursday, 1 July – I will offer some suggestions about how we can avoid an outcome that nobody of course wants. Both posts are meant to […]
China PP demand could fall by 1m tonnes in 2021 but prospects for PE look better despite a weak January-May
By John Richardson THE ABOVE chart confirms that China’s economic slowdown, which began in January-February, continued into May. Remember that the only valid comparisons are between the first few months of this year and late 2020. If you conduct year-on-year comparisons then of course growth will look better because for several months during January-May 2020, […]
Container freight crisis requires new approaches to cash in on strong underlying demand
By John Richardson I MADE THE argument last Thursday that until or unless the world is fully vaccinated against the pandemic, container freight chaos would continue because of further waves of port restrictions such as the ones taking place at ports in Guangdong province. My argument is that we must raise vaccination rates in […]
Container freight crisis could continue until or unless the developing world is fully vaccinated
By John Richardson IF YOU WANT to understand when container-freight chaos will fully come to an end, look at the graphic above from Our World in Data, the fantastic free service set up to fight poverty, disease, hunger, pollution and the world’s other ills with the power of numbers. What you can see is the […]
Inflation pressures build on prolonged supply chain disruptions
By John Richardson OK, I MAY have got this wrong. Inflation could be a bigger problem than I envisaged only three weeks ago. But if so, I would at least be in exalted company. A meeting of the US Federal Reserve concluded that generalised inflation was not a concern, and that “finished goods have not […]
China polyolefins: key signals to monitor on whether 2021 slowdown is reversing
By John Richardson IT REALLY IS EXTRAORDINARY how commentators continue to use year-on-year comparisons for the Chinese economy in H1 this year versus the first half of 2020. Demand was of course always going to be better in H2 2021, provided China maintained control over the pandemic, because the economy came to a virtual […]
Boom in petrochemicals demand guaranteed but we must grow sustainably
By John Richardson ONE OF THE GREATEST achievements of the last 30 years has been the fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 1999, 1.9bn of the world’s population were living on less than $1.90, the Word Bank’s definition of extreme poverty. Despite setbacks caused by the pandemic, this had […]
Booming internet sales point towards strong 2021-2025 LLDPE demand growth
By John Richardson ONLINE SALES accounted for 19% of all retail sales in seven industrialised countries in 2020, up from 16% the year before, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Year-on-year online sales growth numbers by country in 2020 included 59% in Australia, 46.7% in Britain and 14.6% […]
Latest data indicate 37% fall in China’s 2021 HDPE imports with PP imports 49% lower
By John Richardson DECLINES IN Chinese apparent demand for high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) gathered pace in January-April 2021: January-April 2021 apparent demand for HDPE fell by 12% to to 5.5m tonnes versus the last four months of 2020. This compared with an 8% decline in Q1 2021 over Q4 2020. PP apparent consumption […]