ICIS Petrochemical Index (IPEX) Methodology

IPEX Methodology

The ICIS Petrochemical Index (IPEX) provides a capacity-weighted measure of the average change in global or regional petrochemical prices over time.

Dating back to 1 January 2000, historical ICIS prices for a basket of 12 essential petrochemical products in the US, western European and Asian markets are weighted by regional nameplate capacity to generate a monthly index value.

In the global IPEX, each of the 36 global prices are averaged according the share of total nameplate capacity which they represent.

As of October 2020, the baseline has been updated to 1 January 2000. The monthly IPEX takes all settled contract prices available at the time of publication. Any changes in the following month are retrospectively taken into account in the next publication. In deriving each month’s index:

Contract prices are those applicable to the previous calendar month

Domestic and spot prices are an average of ICIS pricing’s weekly published prices for the previous calendar month (four or five weeks accordingly).

This continues the principle of utilising most recent data averages to drive the IPEX. Where ICIS price quotations are not available for individual weeks because of public holidays, then previous week data is carried forward. This form of data interpolation is inferring some limited data points that may not be market derived and customers should be aware of this assumption.

IPEX values are calculated in a live environment and where the price of a commodity is not available, the latest available price is used to calculate the index.

The IPEX is only available to subscribers. For more information, please speak to Sales.