Ms Wang, the secretary general of China National Furniture Association said that this year China soft furniture market saw strong domestic demand and rapid growth in output value.
However, foam factories, raw materials suppliers of soft furniture, were not very active in production due to the limited growth on domestic and exporting sales of soft furniture.
Wang also predicted that production and sales growth rate of soft furniture would decline after the upward trend. However, most market player didn t agree with her completely.
As soft furniture manufacturers saw shrinking profit margin due to declining prices, there were limited long-term regular orders for their raw materials suppliers foam factories. Thereby demand for foam feedstocks like TDI and flexible PPG was restricted to some extent.
Meanwhile, as foam occupied 20% cost of a sofa a lot of sofa producers manufactured with some substitutes which were one-third cheaper than PU foam. As a result, demand for foam went down slightly although soft furniture output increased.
However, average prices of TDI kept at the same level as last year while flexible PPG prices climbed up by 30% this year. As a result, the whole market was predicted to mainly keep an upward trend in the last quarter of this year.
China Chemical Weekly: http://news.chemnet.com/en/detail-1411716.html
