Current(cy): The Importance of Being Up To Date

The World is changing quite rapidly today – mostly because of geopolitics, but also because of a lot of noise and opinion swings in energy transition and its costs. Growth is also an issue. Having the most current views matters.
Companies looking at strategic moves in 2025 – especially where the capital costs are high – will need to be very disciplined with respect to changing direction if the assumptions change meaningfully.
One of the big industry signals today is that global olefin and polyolefin prices are not reacting sufficiently to rising input costs and margins are sliding further – while this is bad for near-term profits, the industry needs it.
There is a risk of commodity weakness across many sectors, including minerals, in 2025 as policy changes in the US and others’ reactions to them may create a long stretch of uncertainty, which could impact growth.
Otherwise, we look at another initiative to boost power investments for data centers, the likelihood of subsidies for hydrogen remaining high in Europe, and why 2025 will be a challenging year for managing ESG.

Exhibit 1: The last four months had seen a dramatic change in how the market views ethylene costs in 2025