Indonesian players: homo-PP supply remains tight in local market

After an extended period of lacking availability, which keeps domestic homo-PP prices on the firming track in the past couple of months, Indonesian players have not seen significant supply relief this week despite a major maker has postponed scheduled turnaround to early 2017. For this reason, local offers in Indonesia has remained mostly unchanged from last week even with weaker import market at the background.

A producer in the country reported, “We hold optimistic view for the remaining of quarter 3 since buyers would most probably return to the market for replenishment in the near term with low inventories on hand now.”

This is confirmed with buyers with a source reiterated, “We have been checking with local sellers to replenish some homo-PP yarn cargoes, but most replied with lack of allocation. We are running low on inventories now, hence we are considering to purchase Singaporean cargoes after the supplier slashed offers by $20/ton from yesterday.” 

However, there are market talks of seeing some volume cargoes arriving this month, which is expected to ease the current tightness to a certain extent. Besides, many buyers have expressed their dilemma in whether to proceed with restocking at the current state of energy market. Yet, the level of inventories on hand might determine the move of the participants in the tug of war.