One volume car manufacturer in Europe achieved a 15% volume increase in Q1 with one of its major brands. The same brand is also achieving margins of around 9%. Who was it? Regular blog readers will know the answer. Renault’s low-cost Dacia was the only major brand to increase Q1 sales apart from Mercedes – […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Licence plate trading drives Q1 jump in China’s auto sales
Something very strange happened in China’s auto market during Q1. As the chart shows, sales (red square) rocketed 20% in January/February versus 2012 (green line), before cooling to 15% growth in March. Neither government nor the auto industry expects this pace to continue: • Government forecasts are for 8% overall growth this year • Industry […]
China’s need to clean up pollution will slow economic growth
Pollution is, unfortunately, one of the downsides of industrial development. Luckily for us in the West, it is mostly a distant memory. But as the BBC picture on the left reminds us, Britain was paralysed by ‘smog’ (a lethal mixture of fumes and fog) only 50 years ago in December 1962. Now it is Beijing’s […]
US auto sales growth slows as Hurricane Sandy impact ends
250,500 US autos were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy last November, according to official data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau. Their replacement was clearly going to have a big impact on auto sales for the following months. Yet strangely, the blog has seen no discussion of this impact. So it has made its own calculations […]
Aging US BabyBoomers mean new home boom unlikely
Is a recovery underway in the US housing market? Investors on Wall Street certainly think so. One over-excited fund manager called the blog recently to exclaim “housing starts were at 500k, now they are at 900k, and they’ll be back to 2 million within a year or two”. His definition of a pessimist was someone […]
Auto sales start to plateau globally
Autos are the largest manufacturing business in the world, and are also the largest single source of demand for chemicals and plastics. So developments in the major markets are key to future economic growth and demand patterns. The chart summarises developments since 2008 in the 7 major markets, which account for 85% of global volume, […]
EU auto sales continue their decline
There really isn’t very much to say about the latest EU auto sales data. They were simply awful. As the chart shows, 2013 volumes (red square) are well below 2012 levels (green line). Less than 800k cars were sold in the 2 months combined, down 10%. Some major markets have now been falling for a […]
Demand weakness spreads across Europe and Asia
The blog was in sober mood when giving its usual New Year Outlook in January, warning that “renewed global recession appears to be the major risk facing us at the start of 2013“. Developments since then only reinforce its caution. Europe and Asia are now seeing widespread weakness in demand: • In Europe, the chairman […]
Demand collapses as stock markets hit new records
Financial markets long ago lost all touch with reality. Not only have central banks provided $tns of cheap liquidity with the specific aim of pushing stock markets higher. But they have also allowed computers to dominate trading, so no single market now knows what it is pricing. Chemical markets, and those who operate in them, […]
China’s PVC imports tumble as its housing market slows
Jiang Zemin never spent too much time worrying about Western financial markets or domestic criticism, either before or after he became China’s president between 1993-2003. Instead, he focused on 3 core areas, which became known as the Three Represents: “The Party must always represent the requirements of the development of China’s advanced productive forces, the […]
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