“At present, the carbon black industry is encountering four major problems: excessive capacity structure, low industry profits, disorderly market competition, and severe export situation.”
Talking about the realistic problems faced by the high quality development of the industry, Wei Ming, chairman of the carbon black branch of China Rubber Industry Association, said.
This was learned from the 2019 China Carbon Black Annual Conference and Membership Conference held on March 14.
| EDTA |
Structural overcapacity
Wei Ming said that since 2002, China’s carbon black production capacity has maintained an annual growth rate of nearly 400,000 tons.
By 2018, China’s total carbon black production capacity reached 7.52 million tons, with a production of only 5.7 million tons. The industry has a serious overcapacity.
In the next two years, there will still be large additional capacity, and the problem of overcapacity in the industry will become more prominent.
Low Profit in Industry
Wei Ming emphasized that with the change of national macro-policy and the weakness of downstream tire market, the situation of carbon black industry continued to decline, and the average start-up rate of the industry in the past five years was only about 70%.
From 2009 to 2018, China’s carbon black industry has made considerable progress, but its profit margin is at a low level. Until 2017, the whole industry had been in a slight profit, even in 2015 a loss.
Last year, the industry’s profit margin was only 7%. It is expected that the situation in 2019 will be even worse.
Market disorder competition
| Melamine |
Wei Ming said that with the increasing contradiction between supply and demand, the pressure of operation of enterprises in the industry is increasing, the competition of market homogenization is intensifying, and the business situation of enterprises is becoming more and more difficult.
Due to the lack of effective market regulation mechanism, in order to compete for limited market resources, carbon black enterprises blindly rush to buy raw materials and products to continuously reduce prices, seriously disrupting the market and accelerating the decline of the market.
Export situation is still grim
Wei Ming pointed out that because the distribution of Chinese carbon black enterprises is only in China, the export situation depends mainly on the price difference between global oil for carbon black and domestic coal tar series resources for carbon black.
In recent years, global oil prices have been operating at a low level, while domestic coal tar has been a popular product with high price fluctuations. China’s carbon black enterprises lost their export price advantage.
With the problems of anti-dumping and green technical barriers facing the export market, part of the carbon black production originally planned for export has been transferred to the domestic market, which makes domestic competition increasingly fierce.
| Benzalkonium chloride |