By John Richardson UNTIL ALL of us are adequately vaccinated none of us are sufficiently protected is a point I’ve been making since late last year. So, providing the developing world with the $66bn it needs to be adequately vaccinated – and we appear to be nowhere near raising that figure – would not be […]
Asian Chemical Connections
We can solve the plastic waste crisis but we don’t have much time
Here is another personal plea about the scale of the plastic waste challenge our industry confronts. We need to act urgently to solve disposal problems in the developing world. By John Richardson IN 2015, a global agreement was reached that 8m tonnes a year of plastic waste entering the oceans was unacceptable, according to […]
China petrochemicals rebound provides major global demand boost
By John Richardson WOW yet again. China’s export-led economic recovery continues to support global petrochemicals demand growth. Our business looks set to enjoy a much better year in 2020 than nearly all us had imagined was possible back in Q1. Here I only look at mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) and paraxylene (PX). But watch this blog […]
The Failure Of The Liberal Political And Economic Elite
By John Richardson ONE of the research papers produced ahead of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos highlighted demographics as one of the key reasons for rising working and middle class discontent in the West. In an exact echo of the arguments that Paul Hodges and I have been putting forward since […]
Xi’s Davos Speech: Risks, Opportunities For Chemicals Industry
By John Richardson CHINA’S President Xi Jinping yesterday delivered a speech to World Economic Forum in Davos that has been widely praised. What made the speech very striking was how its tone and content contrasted with just about everything US president-elect Donald Trump has said. Let’s look at just two aspects of the speech (please read […]
Walking Away From Reality At Tianjin World Economic Forum
By John Richardson SOME of the world’s global business leaders don’t seem to get it. This is the only conclusion we can reach from their reported reaction to Li Keqiang’s opening speech at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, yesterday. “Premier Li Keqiang failed to offer global business leaders any fresh solutions to the […]
New Business Mindset Needed
By John Richardson THE global chemicals industry became used to healthy and steady rates of demand growth during the “Great Moderation” in the West, before the 2008 crisis. As fellow blogger Paul Hodges wrote in January of this year: “Executives could usefully spend time debating whether ethylene growth rates might be 4.2%, or perhaps 4.5%, […]