In a recent investor call, Nutrien reported that its Ag Solutions Digital Hub exceeded its annual target of $500 million in sales by achieving $700 million in just six months. Buoyed by this success, the company is investing more than $50 million annually on digital initiatives in North America and soon beyond. Even so, Wall…
The automotive industry in China has been the largest in the world measured by automobile unit production since 2008. After more than 30 years of rapid and continuous growth, auto manufacturers are staring at a new reality in which passenger car sales are on the decline and market fundamentals are shifting from the sale of internal combustion engine cars…
ADI Chemical Market Resources sees the ongoing pandemic and the commodity price crash impacting the petrochemical industry in several ways including the following: Demand disruptions from the broad economic collapse, Feedstock volatility and margin pressures, Feedstock supply and product demand imbalances Declining sales volumes Significant capital spending cuts Shift to lower feedstock volatility via crude-to-chemicals…
Hot Melt Adhesives – growing demand for polyolefin elastomer-based HMAs Hot melt adhesives (HMAs) are 100% solid thermoplastic polymer-based formulations. They are typically are applied hot at their softening temperature and allowed to solidify by cooling to room temperature to provide necessary adhesion between two different materials. Once applied and brought in contact with the…
ADI Chemical Market Resources (ADI CMR) recently presented a webinar reviewing key trends and sharing an outlook for the global chemical industry. Uday Turaga shared research and insights from theADI CMR team’s research and consulting work. Since ADI’s acquisition of Chemical Market Resources in late 2017, ADI CMR has completed more than 25 projects across…
Super-hard materials are materials above a certain level of hardness beyond which traditional methods of component manufacturing such as milling and turning cannot be utilized. Some examples of these super-hard materials are tungsten carbide, diamond, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, and high-speed steel. Hardness and toughness are often seen as similar material properties but they are…
Global demand for polyolefins increased annually at 3.7%, from 68 million metric tons per year (MMtpy) in 1997 to 160 MMtpy in 2017. This growth has been accompanied by a significant geographical shift in demand, which has gone from North America and Europe constituting over 50% global demand to China and Asia-pacific being the major…
There are two forms of detergents that dominate the global laundry market – liquid and powder detergents. Liquid detergents are more effective for lifting out everyday stains and ground-in dirt while powder detergents are better with food, greasy, or oily stains. While liquid detergents are mostly common in the U.S., powder detergents are popular elsewhere…
The automotive industry is the second largest consumer of polyolefins and their use in vehicles is estimated to grow annually at nearly 9% over the next five years. Polypropylene (PP), polyolefin elastomers (POE), and some mineral fillers such as talc, calcium carbonates, and silicates are the key components of several automotive parts. Polypropylene is the…
Silicone elastomers, sometimes incorrectly known as silicone rubbers, are silicon-based polymers that have been vulcanized. They offer unique performance characteristics such as serviceability over a wide temperature range of -150°F to above +500°F and are readily available in a variety of forms such as solids, open cell foams, closed cell sponges, and are thermally and…