Polyolefins markets in Asia are not behaving in the way that they used to behave. For value-added analysis of these changes, and for price and margin forecasts for the region, contact john.richardson@icis.com for details of how to subscribe to our Asian Polypropylene and Asian Polyethylene forecast reports. By John Richardson NOT everything in […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Too Good To Last for Asian Petchems? Yes
By John Richardson IT has been a fantastic few months for the integrated Asian polyethylene (PE) producers as the above chart illustrates. You can see that the average price for naphtha was $533/tonne CFR Japan in April. This compared with an average high-density PE (HDPE) price of $1,271/tonne CFR Northeast Asia and an average low-density […]
Ageing Populations And Fitting Two Billion Into One Billion
By John Richardson THE above chart is of absolutely critical importance for anybody who is serious about estimating both the strength and nature of future global demand growth for chemicals. If you are not a serious analysts then, sure, ignore demographics and cling on to a few vacuous slogans such as the “rise of the […]
Policymakers Have Failed The World
By John Richardson WHEN the economic, social and political history of 2008-2014 ends up being written, there are two groups of people who are going to end up bearing a lot of the blame for the new global financial crisis. It is the people who run the Fed and those who ran China’s government until […]
The New Global Financial Crisis: Emerging Market Bonds
By John Richardson EXACTLY how the new global financial crisis will gather momentum is becoming clearer by the day. Greatly adding to this clarity was the latest Bank for International Settlements (BIS) quarterly report, which was released earlier this week. The BIS warned that: Off-shore lending in US dollars had soared to $9 trillion, and, […]
September 2008: How History Is Repeating Itself
By John Richardson WE know that weak growth in China, Europe and the US will have a major negative impact on the global economy in 2015. But does this really mean a new global financial crisis? Won’t the world’s economy instead just splutter along as it has done, pretty much, since the last crisis in […]
South Korea: No Room For Complacency
By John Richardson I have long loved South Korea, ever since I first visited the country back in the late 1990s. The sheer guts, determination and get-up-and-go of South Koreans have to be admired, especially when you put this into the context of the almost total devastation inflicted by the Korean War. And South Korea continues […]
South Korea: Coming To Terms With Demographics
By John Richardson ACCUMULATING yet more debt was the very last thing that South Korea needed and here is why: South Koreans had average debts 1.6 times their disposable incomes before July of this year. This compared with 1.4 times disposable incomes in the US in 2007, before the sub-prime housing bubble went pop. And […]
Oil Prices: Ignore Human Nature At Your Peril
By John Richardson JUST four months after the blog first moved to Asia, we got the shock of our lives: The Asian Financial Crisis. We were bewildered and didn’t know what to think, but fortunately, perhaps, there wasn’t much of an Internet in those days. So we had smaller mountains of news and analysis to […]
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 […]
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