Market competition was escalating with rapidly expanding capacity in recent years

Market competition was escalating with rapidly expanding capacity in recent years, which resulted into falling profit on PIY market. Conventional PIY was obviously unprofitable in 2021. There was no new PIY capacity in the first half of 2022 but PIY producers were still under losses. To revert losses, big PIY plants intensively raised price in late-Jun and slashed operating rate to curb price from descending. That meant PIY price did not fluctuate in line with the cost side. From the angle of PIY factories, bigger sales meant larger losses when sales were not profitable. Sales volume would be impacted when the production was slashed while PIY could be profitable at least