in the first year of china’s 12th five-year plan period, the synthetic rubber industry of china maintained a vibrant momentum of expansion with increasing companies engaged in and a rapid expansion of production scale, which has exacerbated the pressure of overproduction, according to the information from the second session of the 6th council of china synthetic rubber industry association and the 20th annual meeting of the industry, held in xi’an on nov. 8-9.
according to mr. hu jie, vice president of china synthetic rubber industry association, china’s synthetic industry, after reaching the first place of consumption in the world in 2003 and of output in 2009, will also forge into the first place of the world in terms of capacity this year. by the end of this year, china’s overall capacity of major synthetic rubber plants is expected to reach 3.33 million tons, including 520,000 tons of new added capacity, up 18.5 percent compared with that of 2010. it is expected that the whole year’s output of synthetic rubber will surpass 2.7 million tons, 12 percent more than that of last year.
if the current trend continues, the association forecasts that by the end of the 12th five-year plan period, china’s annual capacity of synthetic rubber plants will be approaching six million tons. if the importation remains unchanged, the overall utilization rate of the equipment will stand at only 63 percent then. even if 50 percent of the import is replaced by domestic products, the overall utilization rate of the equipment will be only 74 percent.
mr. qi runtong, secretary-general of the synthetic rubber association, points out that china’s synthetic rubber companies will encounter severe market competition in the future, and that there will be great shortage in the supply of butadiene and isoprene, the raw materials of synthetic rubber. qi runtong said that it will be the top priority of the synthetic rubber industry to curb the excess capacity.
at the conference, all of the experts of the sector shared their views on how to deal with the problem of overcapacity. xu wenying, deputy secretary-general of the committee of china rubber industry association suggested that the industry restructure itself with the consideration of the requirements of its downstream industries. at present, the tire industry is making vigorous efforts to develop energy saving tires, and it needs a large quantity of ssbr, high performance butyl rubber, rare earth cis-polybutadiene rubber and integrated rubber. on the other hand, non-tire rubber product industries have great demand for ethylene-propylene rubber and also hope that the yield and types of chloroprene rubber can be increased and that the quality of nitrile rubber and the output of hydrogenated nitrile rubber can be improved. experts including liang aimin, president of yanshan branch, sinopec beijing research institute of chemical industry, also agreed that great efforts should be made to eliminate backward capacity and develop high value-added products.
