Chemical profits match oil & gas for the first time

The aggregate profit of China s domestic petroleum and chemical industries reached 630.89 billion yuan during January-November of last year, up 50% year-on-year, according to a market review and forecast report issued on January 26 by the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation (CPCIF). Profits in oil and natural gas exploitation jumped 65.7% year-on-year to 278.92 billion yuan, while those in the chemical industry totaled 276.002 billion yuan, up 57.9%. The figures reveal that for the first time, aggregate profits in chemical industry were on a par with oil and gas industry.

The proportion of oil and natural gas exploitation dropped more than 40 percentage points in 2010 as compared with 2008; meanwhile, that of the chemical industry rose nearly 9 percentage points, said Zhu Fang, vice director of the Information and Market Department of the CPCIF.

Back in 2005, the oil and natural gas exploitation industry raked in 292.361 billion yuan, while the chemical industry made just 92.576 billion yuan, according to CPCIF s statistics.

The report also revealed a 60% industry-wide rate of return on investment (ROI) in 2010, about 10 percentage points higher than the previous year. The ROI in oil and gas exploitation stayed high in 2010 at 117.7%, affected by the rising international price of crude oil. Meanwhile, the ROI for the chemical industry as a whole edged up 5.7 percentage points to 41.8%, thanks to the upgrading of industrial structures.

The report showed a significant change in the economic growth structure during 2010. As growth in upstream resource-based industries has been decreasing, this has been met with rapid growth in downstream technology-intensive industries.

Taking the chemical industry as an example, the output of special chemicals (including fine chemicals) and synthetic materials accounted for 25.5% and 16% of the total value of output, up 2.5% and 0.3% percentage points compared with 2008. Basic chemical materials made up 24.6%, down 0.9 percentage points, and fertilizer was down 1.3 percentage points. Furthermore, organic chemical raw materials retained a slowly rising trend, while rubber, fertilizer, pesticide, coating and pigment all registered downward trends.

Based on the report, the chemical industry will further accelerate restructuring programs, speed up the elimination of obsolete capacities, and march into the new energy, new materials, biochemical, fine chemical and new coal chemical fields, in doing so sustaining steady profit growth.

Source: China Chemical Information Net