By John Richardson DOW Chemical and DuPont are companies with tremendous histories. It is no exaggeration to say that they have helped to build the American economy, right from the early days of Henry Herbert Dow and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Their innovations have not only created wealth for America, their employees and their shareholders […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Autos Material Science: 180 Degree Change For Petchems
By John Richardson HERE is an example of how the links between the petrochemicals and polymers business and the autos industry have long worked: In the 1980s, propylene was a very low value co-product of naphtha and other liquids cracking. You always make around half a tonne of propylene for every one tonne of […]
Oil Analysts Should Have Taken “O Level” History In The 1970s
By John Richardson WHEN Abraham Darby discovered a way of using coke to smelt iron ore in place of increasingly expensive wood in 1709 his technology didn’t stand still. Armies of engineers sought ways of making his process better, which led to the pivotal introduction in 1828 of “hot blast” technology. The “hot blast” breakthrough […]
Climate Change: Taking Out An Insurance Policy
By John Richardson WOULD you get on board a plane without taking out travel insurance to protect your family? Of course not, even though the chances of you being involved in a plane crash are one in 9 million. And would you step into an ocean where dangerous sharks swim, especially if you live where […]
India HasTo Focus On Sanitation And Education
By John Richardson SO far so good, perhaps: During the last financial year (March 31 2014 to 1 April 2015), 58.6 million new toilets were constructed in India, according to official government statistics. This compares with 48.9 million during the financial year 2013-2014. Narendra Modi has thus made some progress towards tackling the “toilet test” […]
India’s Search For A New Growth Model
By John Richardson THE great news is that China is moving towards a new, and potentially very effective, economic growth model. Can we say the same for India? The reason why I pose this question is because, since Narendra Modi has been elected as Prime Minister, a lot of my Indian contacts have talked about […]
Africa: How To Seize Another Opportunity
By John Richardson WHEN you’ve finished renegotiating with your lenders, your shareholders and your bondholders about what the collapse of oil prices means for your chemicals company, you will, hopefully, have a strategy to come through this crisis more or less in one piece. The next stage is, of course, the implementation of the new […]
Creating Sustainable Chemicals Growth In 2015
By John Richardson AS just about everyone, including me, obsesses about the more than 40% collapse in oil prices and what it means for the chemicals industry, here is another statistic for you: 58,000 newborns die in India every year because they come into this dysfunctional world with bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics. The root […]
China A Nation Of Cheap Copycats? Nonsense
By John Richardson COMPLACENCY is the enemy of good analysis and one particular piece of complacent, and quite frankly lazy, analysis is to dismiss China as being permanently stuck in the category of a” low value copycat nation”. Beware the smartphones business. Anybody who was complacent enough to believe that the Chinese couldn’t make the […]
How To Measure Modi’s Success
By John Richardson WINNING an election is one thing and governing is entirely different – as the hopeless Tony Abbott is discovering in Australia (more in a later blog post). We sincerely hope that Narendra Modi proves to be a great deal more competent than Abbott, who has confirmed our fears. Modi’s first budget, which […]
Jump to page: