PTA Price Has Dropped By 10% From A High Level, And The Shock Has Become Stronger Irreversibly

In April, influenced by the overall strength of the domestic commodity market, the PTA futures price fluctuated higher and reached a recent high of 5212 yuan/ton on April 27. Later, as the upsurge subsided, PTA futures prices fell sharply in a row. On Wednesday, the main contract closed at 4686 yuan/ton, down 10% from the high. On the whole, the prices of upstream crude oil and PX rose PTA production costs; The supply and demand of midstream PTA are basically balanced; Downstream polyester consumption has risen steadily, which is good for PTA as a whole. Considering that the current PTA price has dropped by 10% from a high point, it may become stronger in the future.

Due to the sharp decline in oil prices, the exploitation of high cost shale oil in the United States has cooled down, and the number of drilling platforms has continued to decline. As of May 13, 2016, the number of oil drilling platforms in the United States had dropped for eight consecutive weeks to 318, a decrease of 80% compared with 1600 at the end of 2014. At present, there is no sign of slowing down the number of drilling platforms in the United States.

It is understood that the effective life cycle of shale oil wells is 2-3 years, while the oil wells put into production during the peak period of 2012-2014 have gradually entered the depletion period. Since the end of 2014, Rig platform The number has declined precipitously, and the new production capacity in the future cannot make up for the depletion of old oil fields. Simply calculated based on the proportion of the number of drilling platforms to the production, the shale oil production will decrease by 80%, and the reduction will exceed 3.5 million barrels/day, which is far greater than the current global excess supply of 1.5 million barrels/day.

With the arrival of peak gasoline consumption in summer, the high crude oil inventory may begin to decrease. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and other countries have limited short-term production capacity, and the excess supply of crude oil is narrowing, while the next supply reduction rate may exceed expectations. Once supply falls short of demand, oil prices will continue to rise. In terms of PX, due to domestic PX The capacity growth is slow, and the supply gap is made up by imports. The import volume has increased from 930000 tons in January to 1150000 tons in March. The supply is tight or supports the PX price.

In terms of supply, at the end of April, Taihua Xingye (with an annual capacity of 1.2 million tons) and Hanbang Petrochemical's first line (with an annual capacity of 1.1 million tons) PTA plants were restarted. The capacity of the maintenance plan and the production recovery plan in May offset the capacity. At present, the effective production capacity of PTA is about 32 million to 34 million tons/year. In terms of demand, the output growth rate of polyester from 2013 to 2015 was 8.6%, 2.2% and 9.1% respectively, with an average of 6.7%.

Considering the slowdown of China's economic growth, assuming that the polyester output growth rate in 2016 is 5%, the corresponding PTA demand is about 33 million tons, close to the effective production capacity of PTA, and the supply and demand are basically balanced. In terms of fabric turnover, the turnover of long fiber fabrics was slightly lower than that of the same period, but the daily average turnover of short fiber fabrics in May was 3.38 million meters, which was active.

As of May 17, the operating rate of polyester plant was 84.7%, 4 percentage points higher than that of the same period last year. In terms of inventory, the inventory of polyester filament POY and DTY remained stable compared with previous years, but the 16 day inventory of FDY was at a low level over the same period. The operating rate of polyester plant is high, but the polyester inventory remains low, which reflects that the polyester market is still in the seasonal demand peak season, and the consumption demand is expanding, which forms a certain support for the consumption of polyester raw material PTA.