BLOG: As you plan for 2025, a reminder of the big shift in market fundamentals

SINGAPORE (ICIS)–Click here to see the latest blog post on Asian Chemical Connections by John Richardson.

As you do your budget planning for 2025, don’t lose sight of what the ICIS data consistently tell us.

Any recovery in demand next year is unlikely to make much of dent in the record levels of global oversupply up and down all the chemical values chains. Today’s blog is a reminder of why where are where we are today –

Regular readers of the blog will have been prepared for these events. I of course get things wrong as we all do, but I have been warning about the China risks for more than a decade. I also identified the Evergrande Turning Point shortly after it happened in late 2021.

Beyond 2025, this is what we can learn from the events in China:

• The problem during the Chemicals Supercycle was not enough people asked hard questions about the nature of demand growth in China. Instead, too much analysis focused on feedstock advantage only while assuming demand would take care of itself.
• We thus need to set up demand teams that build much more nuanced and in-depth scenarios about what could happen next in China and elsewhere. How will demographics, climate change, geopolitics and the energy and chemicals transitions shape future global consumption growth?
• Artificial intelligence is potentially a fantastic tool to help us model this complexity, provided we ask it the right questions and use a commodity in much shorter supply than chemicals: Commonsense.

Good luck out there. Here’s to managing our way through these challenging times together.

Editor’s note: This blog post is an opinion piece. The views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of ICIS.