By John Richardson CHINA’S imports of polypropylene (PP) look set to fall to some 4.4m tonnes in 2021 – a 33% reduction over last year’s imports of 6.6m tonnes. The China Customs department trade data for H1 2021 when annualised imply 4.7m tonnes of imports for the full year 2021. But as around 60% of […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Global HDPE demand prospects dim on a slower developing world and China
By John Richardson THE DRAG ON global polyolefins growth from declining demand in the developing world will, I think, be much greater than I thought would be the case in March this year, when I did my last round of forecasts for 2021-2025 consumption. The core of the problem is in my view low vaccination […]
Global PP demand growth being dragged lower by the developing world
By John Richardson IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES the above chart – which shows our base case for global polypropylene (PP) demand in 2021 versus my downside for this year – would be extremely significant. If anything like the weaker growth I envisage for this year were to materialise, the whole world would be pushed into significant […]
Asia PP oversupply creates major opportunity for US buyers
By John Richardson and James Ray THE BIG PRICING divergences that you can see in the above chart could very easily continue over the next few months because of any combination of the following reasons: Asia supply remains long because of weaker demand in China and southeast Asia and big increases in Chinese, South Korean […]
China polyolefins demand declines accelerate as supply chains remain the key challenge
By John Richardson ONE OF THE golden rules that has nearly always applied over the last 20 years is that you never bet against the Chinese economy. Time and again, the doom mongers have been proved embarrassingly wrong. But we now have enough data and anecdotal evidence from 2021 to conclude that the deceleration in […]
China PP demand slowdown accelerates in H1 as freight shortages trap oversupply
By John Richardson THE ABOVE CHART, from the new ICIS Plant Cost Evaluator, underlines the container freight challenges I’ve been highlighting for the Asian petrochemical markets since last year. How the product works is that polypropylene (PP) capacity to the left of the black line, represented by the green shaded area, is capacity that is […]
Pandemic’s third wave seems unlikely to damage global petrochemicals demand
By John Richardson THE GREATEST rock band of all time put it so well in Circumstances from the seminal 1978 album, Hemispheres. The apposite line in the Rush song in relation to this week’s petrochemicals markets is “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (translated from French, “the more things change, the more they […]
The right analysis of China export data confirms moderate slowdown
By John Richardson STATISTICS, if you do not look at them in the right way, can be very misleading. This is the case with last week’s excitement about the growth in China’s June exports of manufactured goods. On a year-on-year basis, exports grew in dollar terms by 32.2% in June from a year earlier compared […]
Southeast polyolefins demand growth could be negative again in 2021
By John Richardson BEFORE the pandemic, GDP growth rates in the developing world were always higher than in developed economies. And because developing economies had much lower levels of petrochemicals consumption than their rich counterparts, it meant that the multiples over GDP were higher than in the rich word, where consumption was pretty much saturated. […]
China, China and China: the three global polyolefin market drivers during the rest of 2021
By John Richardson TODAY’S SET OF slides, starting with the one above, underlines how a deep and constantly updated understanding of what is happening in China is a defining success factor for polyolefins producers and buyers in every country. Even if you are, say, a converter in Brazil, you must understand, month by month, the […]
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