As an important member of the engineering plastics family, polycarbonate has a wide range of application fields due to its outstanding characteristics such as high transparency, high impact resistance and heat resistance. With the development of society and economy, the demand for engineering plastics is an inevitable trend. At present, the domestic consumption of polycarbonate accounts for more than 40% of the total consumption of engineering plastics, and occupies an important position in the national economy.
Internationally, the world's polycarbonate capacity is developing rapidly, reaching about 6 million tons/year in 2020. At present, established European and American companies represented by Covestro and Trinseo and Japanese companies led by Mitsubishi, Teijin and Idemitsu, as well as Korean companies such as Lotte and LG, occupy a leading position in the global market. Since 2010, a large number of polycarbonate production capacity has been transferred to Northeast Asia, and Asia has become an important production base for the world's polycarbonate market. It is expected that the global polycarbonate production capacity will still be on the rise in the next few years.
In China, according to the statistics of www.chemsino.com, in the past five years, China's polycarbonate production capacity has grown rapidly, from about 600,000 tons/year in 2015 to nearly 1.80 million tons/year by the end of 2020, with an average annual growth rate of more than 20%. With domestic enterprises investing in new plants, China's polycarbonate production capacity will be further improved. It is expected that by 2025 it will break through 4.50 million tons/year, and the average annual growth rate will still exceed 20%. On the other hand, the growth rate of domestic polycarbonate demand will be maintained at 3% -5%. By 2025, domestic demand will exceed 3.30 million tons, and the growth rate of production capacity is much higher than the growth rate of demand.
Although our country's polycarbonate industry has achieved rapid development, it is generally in the cultivation stage, and there are still many problems and deficiencies, among which the more prominent is product homogeneity - on the one hand, the production capacity of low-end products is released, showing a situation of excess; on the other hand, high-end products still rely on imports. Although domestic production capacity has increased significantly in recent years, output growth is limited. Therefore, the product self-sufficiency rate has not exceeded 40%, and there is still a demand gap of 130-1.40 million tons per year that needs to be made up by imports. In the period of relatively stable market, the price of polycarbonate is relatively "flat", and the difference between high-end and low-end is not too obvious. Once the market rises and falls sharply, a huge gap will be opened. In the first nine months of this year, the price difference between the two on the market was around 3,000 yuan (ton price, the same below); in the fourth quarter of this year, the polycarbonate market rose significantly, driven by strong demand and rising raw material costs. Covestro's high-end materials were priced at more than 28,000 yuan at their peak, and even quoted more than 30,000 yuan; while domestic low-end materials rose to 22,000 yuan. During the same period, the price of bisphenol A, the raw material of polycarbonate, soared from 12,000 yuan to nearly 20,000 yuan. Obviously, low-end materials are more likely to be squeezed by costs and are in a relatively difficult situation. In view of this, the Polycarbonate Branch of the China Synthetic Resin Association submitted to the National Development and Reform Commission, MIIT and other government departments in 2019 the "China Polycarbonate Industry Development Survey Report" on "China's polycarbonate industry investment overheating, and it is urgent to prevent overcapacity". In April 2020, in the new edition of the industrial adjustment guidance catalog, polycarbonate production is no longer included in the "encouraged" project.
In addition, with the continuous advancement of the plastic circular economy, the voice of the "plastic limit order" continues to rise, and the sustainable development of the polycarbonate industry is also facing new challenges. Leading enterprises in the polycarbonate industry should actively prepare for a rainy day. On the one hand, they should improve the physical recycling of materials themselves in China and strive to achieve a closed loop. On the other hand, they should invest a lot of technical force and R & D funds in the way of chemical recycling to solve the difficult problems of physical recycling.
Overall, in the next few years, the original main consumption areas of polycarbonate in our country, such as electronic and electrical products, hollow solar panels, non-disposable drinking water buckets and food containers, will continue to maintain a stable growth momentum. Frontier applications focus on high-performance composite materials, such as 5G-related applications, new energy, aerospace, optical components, optoelectronic information, etc. In the next few years, China's polycarbonate production capacity will show a "blowout growth", which will promote the rapid development of China's polycarbonate industry. On the other hand, although a large number of duplicate construction can meet the market demand for the commercialization of low-end products, it is also likely to lead to overcapacity in the industry as a whole. Therefore, the polycarbonate industry as a whole needs benign guidance and standardization, and it is urgent to prevent excessive low-level and low-quality production capacity. The state should specifically encourage the development of high-end polycarbonate products to avoid the unfavorable situation of structural shortage of high-end products in the case of overall overcapacity in the future. At the same time, the industry is also facing environmental protection challenges. At the government level, it is necessary to increase industry and industry publicity, take various measures to deal with plastic pollution, and actively encourage more relevant parties to participate in the process of mechanical and chemical recycling of polycarbonate. With sustainable development as its own responsibility, it will create a green future for the industry.
