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Phillips Townsend, a well-known
marketing research organization, has estimated the consumption of
the Speciality PP grades has reached a level of about 1.4 million
tonnes in 2001. The market analysis is essentially focused on America,
Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. It would therefore be quite possible
that the consumption could be even closer to 2 million tonnes, translating
to almost 5 % of the total consumption of 32 million tonnes.
This figure seems to be quite small for the largest
volume and most dynamic commodity polymer in the World. These speciality
grades do not contribute significantly at the macro level, either
in the overall growth of PP or the overall profitability. This is
true under the assumption that these specialty grades will grow
at twice the rate of the remaining PP grades in the next 5 years
along with providing 25% higher value additions. In fact, some of
the commodity producers in the World may think that it is better
to enhance productivity and reduce the process loss during manufacture
and achieve same or better profitability, as compared to the uncertainty
of the success of the newer developments. While this view may be
correct in the shorter term, these specialties have made PP grow
faster and the largest despite its late commercialization as compared
to PE and PVC. These specialities expand the application windows
that help PP to substitute other plastics and grow better than all
other volume plastics.
This new study deals with about 9 products that include 2 compounded
products and 7 reactor products. Our earlier newsletters (50
and 51)
describe some other new developments that have good future potential
and would help the dynamic PP to dominate the global plastics scenario.
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