Downstream beverage, edible oil and PET sheet plants operation condition enhances

According to CCFGroup statistics, operating rate of major downstream plants in January is higher than that in December. Several large beverage factories have raised their running rate to more than 70%, some 80%. Edible oil factories are mostly operating at full capacity. Sheet factories have been on the rise recently due to the rush of orders pre-holiday.

Running rate of most sheet factories in East China have lifted 70-90%, with few at 100%. In South China, operating rate has risen from 30-50% to 60-70%. However, comparatively speaking, sheet factories in South China have built PET stock in advance, and there is no new procurement recently. In East China, due to the serious oversale by traders in early stage, sheet factories are in short of spot PET. In addition, as the price spread between PET bottle chip and bright chip has reached nearly 1500yuan/mt, sheet factories once purchased bright chip as a backup, but this has pushed bright chip prices to continuously rise, and supply of some sellers also see tightness. Coupled with the difficulties in picking up goods in some parts of the north, sheet factories also have to re-consider to accept PET bottle chip at the cost of 8000yuan/mt plus, which is also one of the reasons why the spot trading atmosphere has rebounded. Besides, End-user plants began to close this week, and trading is expected to flatten gradually.