PET market: Fiercer competition ahead

The Asian PET market has been overwhelming over the past couple of years with the arrival of a series of new plants in China. While supply-demand dynamic hold pretty balance in most part of 2016 thanks to growing demand in local China, players are expecting fiercer competition in the first half of 2017, as near to 2 million tons/year new capacity are set to come online.

China Resources has started commercial run at its new 300,000 tons/year PET unit this week, yet the impact on the actual supply in the final quarter of 2016 might not be significant until later. Three more major plants are slated to come online during the first half of 2017 as shown in the above table.

A Chinese trader commented, “The impact of the new start up might be mitigated during the late Q1 and early Q2 as this is the peak season for beverage sector.” However, with the on-going anti-dumping investigation initiated by Indonesian and Japanese government on import PET from China, suppliers here might need to exploit new export destination.