By John Richardson
LAST week’s sharp decline in polyethylene (PE) pricing in China is being partly blamed on converters who occasionally act as traders liquidating their raw-material inventories.
Trading activity by end-users can account for more than 10% of total sales activity in the Chinese market in any one week, the blog has previously been told.
A broad-based price correction on declining crude was reported by ICIS pricing for week. For example, linear low-density PE (LLDPE) was assessed $90/tonne lower at $1,160-1,230/tonne CFR China on 21 May compared with the previous Friday. High density PE film was at $1,120-1,150/tonne CFR China – down $60/tonne.
“The converters saw crude slipping and so might well have entered markets in great numbers to sell their stocks. It should be remembered that compared with conventional traders they are always in a stronger position to trade resin because they get cheaper supplies from Sinopec and the local Chinese/foreign joint-venture producers,” speculated one industry source.
“I think this activity by the processors could have played an important role in the price declines. From their perspective you can understand the decision to re-sell their stocks as the economic outlook at that time was exceptionally uncertain on worries that the European debt crisis could lead to a new global economic crisis.
“Also weighing on their minds were lending restrictions in China designed to cut overall credit growth and slow the property sector down.
“It might have seemed a lot safer to sell inventories rather than produce plastic goods that nobody might want to buy. The other risk they could have been hedging against was further steep declines in crude that would have left them unable to pass-on their raw material costs to their customers.”
This is obviously highly speculative, and only one opinion, but it does point to just how difficult the Chinese market is to read. More research is needed by this blog – and more opinions are more than welcome.
This theory, though, does offer support to the argument we will develop over the coming days: That the recent price declines do not necessarily reflect weaker fundamentals. The demand-growth numbers we are going to provide for Q1 point to the China boom story continuing.
And a further illustration of how PE markets could have separated from the fundamentals was what one producer described as a “growing correlation with the Dalian Commodity Exchange over the last week or so.”
As we have reported before, Dalian offers a futures contract in LLDPE that at times reportedly leads physical pricing. This was the case last week when the contract fell 5%, the maximum allowed in one day’s trading, which was followed by a drop in physical RMB pricing.
“At times of extreme volatility and uncertainty, the Dalian becomes the market-setter. Somebody needs to do a study into how Dalian moves with the local stock market, with crude and in turn how Dalian then actually influences the deals that are done in the real market and how the correlations have varied since the futures contract really took off early last year.”
Over to the statisticians……