By John Richardson I SUSPECT that the bigger story for the global petrochemicals industry in H1 may not turn out to be the extraordinary production shortages in the US and Europe that are being so well detailed by the ICIS pricing and analytics teams. “Eh, what on earth are you talking about?” you may well […]
Asian Chemical Connections
China’s ethylene glycols imports could decline by 45% in 2021
By John Richardson LET ME start with the good news first. As with the global polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) markets, the ethylene glycols (EG)* business isn’t likely to find that demand will be a problem in 2021. We can start to build the evidence for this conclusion by considering last year’s Chinese textiles and […]
Global PP demand to remain resilient in 2021 even if we fail to control the pandemic
By John Richardson THE ABOVE chart, using polypropylene (PP) as an example, neatly crystallises an argument I’ve been making since last August: that the changes in 2020 end-use demand resulting from the pandemic enabled petrochemicals and polymer producers to more than compensate for the overall weakness of economies. Despite the collapse of GDP growth last […]
China paraxylene imports may be just 6.6m tonnes in 2021 – 58% lower than only three years ago
By John Richardson PLEASE DON’T say I didn’t tell you. Further big declines in China’s paraxylene (PX) imports seem likely in. We could also see less dramatic falls in polypropylene (PP) and styrene monomer (SM) imports this year, which I shall detail in later posts. But here a I shall focus on PX. This year’s […]
Final China PE 2020 numbers and new outlook for this year as logistics and pandemic threats increase
By John Richardson NOW THAT we have the final data for 2020, for last December, we can complete the picture of what was a truly extraordinary year. As I’ve been highlighting since last August onwards, a pandemic-related shift in demand led to a much stronger Chinese polyethylene (PE) market than just about anyone had expected. […]
China’s economic dominance carries many short and long-term risks for petrochemicals
By John Richardson JUST 5% of US companies with revenues of more than $500m plan to relocate operations out of China, according to the latest survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. This partly reflects highly networked manufacturing clusters, wrote the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in this excellent article. “Automotive and electronics clusters […]
New China pandemic outbreak China single-biggest risk for global petchems in 2021
By John Richardson CHINA FACES another test of its pandemic control capabilities because of new outbreaks in Hebei and Heilongjiang provinces. On Wednesday, China recorded its first coronavirus death in eight months in Hebei. From an economic perspective, the good news, as CNBC reported, was that “Heilongjiang accounted for just over 1% of China’s GDP […]
Assessing global PP prospects next year: seeing the simplicity through all the complexity
By John Richardson IT COULD be very complicated and yet, as the chart above indicates, it might instead by extremely simple. Here I use the example of polypropylene (PP), but similar complexities and one simplicity also apply to the paraxylene and styrene markets and all their downstream derivatives, as I shall discuss in later blog […]
Risks ahead for global polypropylene much greater than for polyethylene
By John Richardson THERE SEEMS to be few risks ahead for the global polyethylene (PE) market over the next five years. The internet sales boom, despite all the talk about using less plastic for sustainability reasons, promises to provide strong support for consumption. The average internet sale is dropped 17 times before delivery, providing a […]
China’s PE imports in 2021 could be as high as 19.8m tonnes or as low as 16.8m tonnes
By John Richardson IN SCENARIO 3 in the above chart, China would import 16.8m tonnes of polyethylene (PE) in 2021. This would be down by 13% from the estimated total imports for this year – 18.9m tonnes – based on annualising the actual January-September import data. The January-October data should be available later this week. […]
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