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GEOPOLITICS IS, I believe, just one aspect of a crisis facing the chemicals industry that is deeper and more complex than anything we have faced before. Front mind right now in geopolitics is Ukraine-Russia and the gas-supply crisis facing Europe,
High-density polyethylene (HDPE) demand in the developing world in 2023 could contract by 300,000 tonnes, rather than, as in our base case, grow by 800,000 tonnes because of the food crisis. Assuming all the other regions grew as under our base case, global growth would be 2% in 2023 rather than our base case of 4%.
EUROPE'S NET HDPE imports could be as high as 4.1m tonnes in 2022 versus last year's 1.1m tonnes.
FEW PEOPLE HAVE made money out of shorting China. Time and time again, brief periods of weak economic growth have been followed by roaring, eye-wateringly big recoveries. And in time-honoured tradition, as the above chart illustrates, Beijing is pump-priming the economy with lots of extra stimulus. As you can see from the rising blue line, ...
IT WILL NOT be easy to estimate what could be higher-than-expected levels of European petrochemicals imports during the rest of 2022. But in the context of a China that might even be in recession, the extra effort necessary to figure calculate shifts in European trade flows is very, very worthwhile.