Rising US Polypropylene no longer attractive to China

04-Mar-10

With the recent run-up in American propylene costs and PP prices, players in China no longer find US offers attractive, as per Chemorbis. However, American PP made big inroads into China during 2009 with imports rising to 493,382 tons of American homopolymer PP, up four times from 2008 levels of 117,673 tons. Other big winners in China’s import boom last year, which saw total homopolymer PP imports rise by nearly double to 4,160,701 tons from 2,788,921 tons in 2008 included South Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, India and Brazil. Brazil lept to 132,054 tons last year from just 11,120 tons the prior year. Other countries which saw a large year over year increase include Austria, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Kuwait, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Spain, while Turkmenistan showed up for the first time. As for American PP in the Turkish market, 2009 marked another year of decline in their share of imports accounting for just 27,133 tons. This followed from the decline in 2008 at 27,542 tons, which was down from 2007’s figure of 122,143 tons. However, overall homopolymer PP imports were up slightly last year in Turkey at 371,341 tons in total compared to the 2008 figure of 317,334 tons. The largest contributor in 2009 by far was Saudi Arabia at 202,581 tons with the next closest figures shared by Israel at 86,817 tons and Greece at 86,182 tons. Other main contributors included Italy, Belgium, France, Spain and India.