Update from our Head of Sales Bulk Monomers, Olivier Vandermotte, on the market situation for methacrylate monomers
Dear Valued Partners,
The year started off with yet again a flurry of challenges as supply chain woes and macro-economic perspectives clouded what has been a path of recovery. And let me assure you that it sure has been a path of recovery. As we initiated our new pricing initiatives a year ago, we have been able to successfully restore consumer confidence in the European Methacrylate value chains. Even though we obviously still have a way to go, we are happy to observe that the overall market sentiment continues to show demand recovery in our major industrial segments. We are not out of the woods yet. Pockets of scepsis still arise from time to time, but luckily those have become the exception rather than the norm. However, the geopolitical crisis around the Ukraine war, the Red Sea conflict and tensions between the different political systems prevail and fuel uncertainties.
It sure has not been an easy six months when we look at the overall asset footprint in our global network. As low demand projections opted us to maintain a reasonable inventory level at the end of last year, supply chains came quickly under pressure as we were undergoing our planned maintenance shutdowns in Europe and the US. Now that those have passed, we look back and see that we were able to mitigate the majority of such impact for our partners whilst continuously supporting the recovery of demand and of onshoring European monomer’s consumption by providing fair and equitable value for every downstream application.
We are humble and grateful for the confidence that our partners have given us after a very rocky 2022 and 2023. And to them we say: “we are ready to go the extra mile if markets turn volatile again”. What is even more comforting is the fact that our discussions have pivoted from pricing oriented discussions towards emphasizing supply reliability at these volatile times. We see sustainable earnings models in all of our end use applications. Agreed, we are not yet in any kind of pre-covid environment, but the mere pricing stability in combination with gradual economic recovery is allowing actors to reconfirm long term sustainable earnings models that drive the investment strategy into longer term projects. We are looking forward to bringing LiMA online in the fourth quarter of this year which without a doubt reconfirms our fundamental footprint and continuous investment in our global production network and supply chain reliability.
Now let’s get ready for the second half of 2024, to which I can only hope that it develops as positive as the first one.