Valve opportunities in the chemical and petrochemical industries

摘要

Literary fans of the 19th-century American novelist Mark Twain will recall a famous quip - made late in Twain's life - where he wryly observed that "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated". It seems that the same statement could aptly have been applied more than 100 years later in the context of the petrochemicals industry in North America around 2008 and 2009. Around that time, the industry in the US was largely presumed to be in serious decline because of recession, falling demand, and high-priced domestic feedstock. At the same time, competition from Middle East petrochemical producers with access to feedstock at a fraction of the cost of North American feedstock was seriously impacting the North American petrochemicals export industry, as well as that of western Europe and Japan. The Middle East producers were, moreover, closer to the growing Asian markets which made a difficult situation even more difficult for North American exporters. The bottom line: reports of the industry's decline in the United States seemed at the time to be not at all exaggerated. However, as current circumstances have shown, things have changed.