| Green industries,blue economy and the increased focus on building a modern infrastructure are all essential parts of China's 13 th Five-Year Plan.Epoxy resin is a clean and modern key material tailored to support the important goals of the Five-Year Plan,enabling greener manufacturing as well as products for infrastructure and marine industries.After years with steadily decreasing prices the price of epoxy resin in China increased by more than 100% in fall 2017.For epoxy purchasers this created an unstable market situation in world's largest epoxy market.The price had been known to be based on raw material cost,oversupply was significant and consumer were used to a buyers' market.The thesis aimed to evaluate the epoxy price in domestic China.It wanted to identify the price predictors and the influential coefficient of these predicting variables.Based on the results the objective was to apply the data and explain the causes for the price increase in fall 2017.The timespan of the research ranged from January 2016 to December 2017.A significant part of thesis has been to review the related literature and to understand the epoxy production value chain and the production cost drivers.In the process it has been revealed implementation of new environmental regulations which based on time and content came up as a likely contributor to the price increase.Price data of key intermediates in the epoxy value chain were collected in the Chinese domestic market.Price data of fundamental petrochemical sources were collected in the global market.Indicators of production activity and general raw material indexes were accessed through the National Bureau of Statistics.Price determination models were developed for further analysis.The data were analyzed through multiple regression analysis.The analysis confirmed that the price of epoxy resin in the Chinese domestic market indeed had been priced on raw material costs,and that most of the price increase in fall 2017 were caused by an increase in epoxy feedstock cost.Additionally,the price of epoxy resin was on average 6.43% higher in August,September,October and November 2017 than what can be explained by the increase in feedstock prices.This is likely to have been caused by an implementation of stricter environmental regulations.Furthermore,the analysis confirmed that the price of natural gas and crude oil is important for the price development of epoxy resin.Future research on the price of epoxy resin should focus on the price of epichlorohydrin. |
PDF Full Text Request