US acrylic acid orders rise after hurricane
Prices likely to increase due to limited supply: companies
US orders for China’s acrylic acid products increased in the past several days, as major chemical plants in Texas had to close facilities that were affected by Hurricane Harvey, companies told the Global Times on Thursday.
These companies as well as industry experts predicted the price of acrylic acid products will likely rise as a result of the combined effect of the influx of overseas orders and domestic plants’ low operation rate.
Acrylic acid is traditionally used as the raw material for acylic esters. Applications for water-based acrylics include adhesives, paper, leather coatings and tablet coatings.
As Harvey, which became a tropical storm, continues to hammer Texas, the US’ center for petrochemical plants and refineries, several major US acrylic acid plants are suspending operations.
BASF, American Acryl and Arkema Inc said they had shut their facilities as a precautionary measure. As of Wednesday, the shutdowns involved production capacity of 710,000 tons a year, which represents 59 percent of the country’s whole production capacity of acrylic acid, a report on industry website chem99.com said on Wednesday.
Dow Chemical Co reduced its operation rate to 60 percent to 70 percent, and its logistics operations have also been affected, chem99.com noted.
Since the output of acrylic acid in the US may be seriously affected for some time by the storm, China’s exports of the product to the US are expected to increase, according to a report released by BOC International on Thursday A staff member surnamed Li at a leading acrylic acid company in East China told the Global Times on condition of anonymity that his company began to received more orders from the US clients two days ago and the same happened with other companies in the industry. “Not only many US clients are placing orders from our company, clients from other countries, who sually purchase acrylic acid from the US began to make inquiries to us he said, noting the company's exports to the US market had been fl at this year before the hurricane. However, an employee of Formosa Acrylic Esters ( Ningbo) Co, who declined to be identifi ed, said d that the impact
the same level of equity exposure, three suggesting an increase, while one rec-omended a cut.
While average recommended alloca-tions to most major sectors were little changed, those to metals shares contin-ued to rise for the third straight month to 8.8 percent – their highest in seven years – reflecting a sustained rally in the prices of upstream resources and industrial products.
Average recommended allocations to electronics and technology stocks were raised to 23.8 percent from 22.1 percent, according to the poll.
The value investing strategy that at-taches more importance to enterprise competitiveness, earnings growth and valuations could continue to dominate among market participants in the sec-ond d half, a Shanghai- based fund man-ager said.
The leading blue- chip firms with sta-ble results and valuations that are not rich are still worth investing in, while the investors could also seek opportu-nities in growth stocks that start to be reasonably valued, the fund manager added.