Europe traders, buyers underline uncertainty in chems industry – CMCI

LONDON (ICIS)–Sentiment among the traders and distributors in the European chemicals market is quite mixed according to data from this month’s ICIS Chemical Market Confidence Index (CMCI) released on Thursday.

(*Forward-looking data for December was for next 12 months, while from January onwards, forward-looking sentiment will be based on the next six months)

Confidence in current business conditions (+33.1 points), future order book volumes (+6.1 points) and current profitability (+25.5) all saw month-on-month increases.

However, the other three indicators all saw notable declines in confidence as the uncertainty that faces business across Europe going in to 2017 begins to take its toll.

Future business conditions and future profitability dropped 8.2 and 21.9 points respectively, while current order book volumes decreased by 3.4 points.

The ICIS Europe CMCI aggregates sentiment from hundreds of petrochemical market players actively involved in price negotiations across more than 60 different markets.

The Europe CMCI runs from +100, to -100, with zero on each index representing neutral, or uncertain conditions, a negative score indicating bearish expectations and a positive score representing bullish expectations. The indices also gather sentiment on the comparison between the current situation and the situation across the past 12 months to give a complete picture of current market conditions and confidence. The information is gathered in the third week of each month.  A full methodology is available on request.

For more details on the overall Europe CMCI data, click here