Resin To Riches: Weekly Plastic Market Insights

Polymer Global Analysis

Resin To Riches: Weekly Plastic Market Insights

• General Thoughts: We focus on the global PVC market today and, particularly, discounted US PVC prices relative to Europe and Asia – while we do not expect US prices to surge, we also argue that downside risk appears low.
• Polyethylene (PE): Global spot PE prices rose into 2025, but the positive momentum appears to be waning, and we see further price hikes are tough to support unless oil prices surge higher, or unplanned supply issue develop.   
• Polypropylene (PP): Spot PP prices weakened in Western markets relative to Asia last week, but Western price premiums are high – average Asia spot PP reflects a ~19% discount to Western average levels per our estimate.
• Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC): US and Europe ethylene di-chloride (EDC) values dropped last week, and we view most EDC production using spot USGC ethylene as unprofitable – this setting plays into our US PVC price support case.
• Other Sector Developments: We highlight global chemical feedstock market trends to argue that current ratios imply a flatter production cost curve YoY, which implies lower global polymer prices and US margins YoY.

Exhibit 1 – Chart of the Day: US spot PVC prices reflect a discount to Asia, Europe and Brazil on average. 

Source: Bloomberg, C-MACC Analysis, February 2025