I buy chemicals in China and I look at a different region in Asia every week

I buy chemicals in China and I look at a different region in Asia every week. This week it was the interior, and there are plants coming on stream there that hardly anyone in Europe has on their radar.

I am Siggi. I know the chemistry in Asia.

I pick a region and look at what is being built and what is starting up. No product list, no supplier list, including products I do not handle today. This time it was the Chinese interior, so Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei and Sichuan.

I work with Chinese sources for this. Environmental notices from the provincial authorities, which state a project with its product and volume long before the plant runs. Announcements from the chemical parks and industrial zones telling you who is moving in. Mandatory filings from the listed groups, and the local press on the ground. 147 searches, nearly all of them in Chinese. By the time something appears in English, it is old news in China and usually too late to act on.

Of the 64 plants I looked at, there are 15 where I would approach the producer. The other 49 carry on, just for the domestic market. I found no evidence that those companies export at all. Capacity is not an offer yet. That does not mean they are off the list. All 49 sit in my database and come back up automatically in six months with the question of whether anything has moved. People in Europe regularly underestimate how quickly a purely domestic supplier turns into an exporter.

What stays with me from the 15 is above all the scale in solvents. Hubei has had an acetic acid plant running since May 2025 with 600,000 tonnes a year, and next to it a first stage of acetates in the same order of magnitude, so ethyl acetate, butyl acetate, propyl acetate and methyl acetate. Sichuan is following. The second expansion stage of a plant for carbonate and acetate solvents in electronic grade went into trial operation there in July, designed for 400,000 tonnes. Dimethyl carbonate in Shaanxi is laid out for 500,000 tonnes, with the first 100,000 running since final acceptance in November 2025.

It gets more granular with the intermediates. A new pentaerythritol plant with 40,000 tonnes has been running in Hubei since March, taking the group to 70,000. Lubricant additives are a case of their own. A site in Henan is growing to 460,000 tonnes, 115,000 of which are already in place, with the rest due by the end of 2028. And in Inner Mongolia 300,000 tonnes of L-threonine are scheduled to start up in October.

China moves faster than portfolios in Europe get adjusted. If you only get to know these plants when someone calls and offers you something, you are talking about volumes others have already taken. That is why I look at this every week.

Two of the 15 are far enough along that I will be speaking to them this week. Next week it is India.

That's the chemistry.
Siggi