The blog celebrated its 100,000th visit during 2011. Its readership also continued to increase, and now covers 142 countries and 5992 cities. The map shows the major centres of readership, which include all the main petchem hubs.
Readers also remain very loyal, with 40% visiting at least once a week during 2011. Over the past 6 months, they have become even more loyal, with 54% visiting at least once a week.
The highlight of the blog’s year was the launch of its ‘Boom, Gloom and the New Normal’ eBook, co-authored with John Richardson. This argues that demand patterns are changing, due to the ageing of the Western BabyBoomers. Its key messages have been receiving increasing attention from companies and policymakers.
Generous sponsorship from Vitol also meant that a hard-cover version of the first 7 chapters could be circulated at our European conference in November. The online PDF version is also still available, if you would like to click here.
The other notable feature of the year was the launch of the IeC Downturn Alert at the end of April. Its aim was to help ensure that the industry did not fall into the same trap of over-optimism that created such problems at the end of 2008. The blog hopes that its reports have helped to ensure that inventories remained under control in recent weeks.
The blog has also greatly valued the opportunity to speak at a number of industry conferences, and to share ideas with many individual companies and their management teams.
Thank you very much for your continued support.