New petrochemical project brings gloom to Asian manufacturers

09 Jun '09

2 min read

One more petrochemical project is in the offing in the Middle East, bringing despair to an industry which is going to battle with over capacity in the next few years. SABIC and Sipchem have jointly announced investment of US $4 billion to set up a slew of plants.

The plan is to build nine plants in all to manufacture specialty and electronic industry plastic raw materials. This will bring more troubles to manufacturers in Asia who are not able to compete with the Middle East manufacturers in terms of cost.

In the pipeline is a MMA plant with a capacity of 250,000 metric tons per annum, PMMA plant of 30,000 tons per year, an AN plant of 200,000 tons per year, a PP plant with a capacity of 50,000 tons per annum.

Also is a POM plant with a capacity of 50,000 tons, a PAN plant with a capacity of 5,000, and a sodium cyanide plant with a capacity of 40,000 tons. Sipchem as its contribution will invest in a 125,000 tons per annum PVA plant and an EVA plant with a capacity of 200,000 tons per year.

The direct brunt of expansion in petrochemical capacity by Middle East producers will be felt directly by the Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese petrochemical manufacturers since most of this output will be sold in their Asian markets.

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India