By John Richardson WHAT a fantastic year it has so far been for margins, with the chart above showing how in one grade of polyethylene (PE), Northeast Asia (NEA) and European producers are really, really cashing in. The same applies across many others grades of both PE and polypropylene (PP). In Northeast Asia, one of […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Fed Policies Increase Emerging Market Poverty
By John Richardson THERE are 2.8bn people – 40% of the world’s population – who live on $2-10 a day. These people are “the fragile middle”, according to the Financial Times, as they are constantly in danger of falling back into poverty. And those risks have been greatly escalated by the policies of the US Federal Reserve. Here […]
Malaysia: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
By John Richardson ANYONE who visits Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city, might well come away with the impression that everything is well with the country. The hotels are heaving as are the restaurants, bars and shopping centres. So are the stalls on Petaling Street where, remarkably, it is possible to buy a luxury, top-of-the range […]
China Reforms: The Global Implications
By John Richardson IT can feel logical to assume that the fundamentals of the petrochemicals business in Asia haven’t really changed. When you think about it, apart from a brief interruption in the region’s success story during the Asian Financial crisis in 1997-1998, everything has been pretty much plain sailing. And in retrospect, the severity […]
Poverty Alleviation Matters More Than GDP
By John Richardson RICH people, relatively speaking, don’t buy that many chemicals and polymers – hence, poverty reduction matters from a dollars and cents as well as a moral perspective. Thus, a report released this week by the Asian Development Bank, Support for Inclusive Growth, makes for very disturbing reading. David Pilling from the FT, […]
The Petronas Decision: What It Means
By John Richardson LAST week’s decision by Petronas to go ahead with its $27bn refinery and petrochemicals complex at Pengerang in Johor, Malaysia, tells us that: Nation building remains important in the petrochemicals business. This project will create huge further economic value for Malaysia through all the construction and operating jobs created and the revenues […]
China’s About Turn: The Seven Global Implications
By John Richardson HISTORIANS will end up concluding that falling emerging market currencies and stock markets – the prelude to what could be a full-blown crisis – is really about China and not about the US Federal Reserve. The Fed is just a sideshow to the main event of what is going to drive not […]
“Fragile Five” Now “The Exposed Eight”
By John Richardson IT used to be just the “Fragile Five” – Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey. But last week, the Financial Times, drawing on data and analysis from Schroders, added three more countries to the list of those most-exposed to Fed tapering: Hungary, Poland and Chile. Thus we needed a new handy […]
Gas, Gas, And Perhaps Even More Gas
By John Richardson THE global petrochemicals industry is stepping on the gas as it accelerates both capacity expansions and the restructuring of existing assets. Apologies for the pun. In the US, of course, some 25m tonnes/year of ethylene capacity is due to be added, most of it after 2017, thanks to big volumes of cheap […]
The US Growth Conundrum
By John Richardson WHERE is the growth in the US economy going to come from to consume the big increase in the country’s ethylene and derivatives production due to take place from 2017 onwards? This is a question that continues to trouble the blog when we study charts such as the one above. It is […]
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