On Sunday, May 13th, 2018, the Petrochemical Development of Downstream Industries (PDID) office of NPC announced new base prices for the current week starting from May 13th till May 20th.

This is the fourth consecutive week that at the absence fluctuation of the value of the US$ dollar does not play any role in detecting the price of polymer materials. As it is the four-week period that the value has been set at Rials per US$. However the truth is that, in offering and selling products, the dollar price in the informal market has been affected by demand, and ultimately the price.

Anyway, after the withdrawal of the US from the nuclear deal, it is the first time that the base prices of the polymer materials have been discovered and announced. Naturally, prices are affected only by the remaining factor in the pricing formula, i.e., the global fluctuations in the polymer prices, and for this reason almost all grades have experienced a relative increase in prices this week. In fact only one material showed a small increase and it was the 7240 grade of HIPS.

Remaining only few weeks to the summer season as well as the Ramadan period, the purchase of PET bottle grade was the purpose of high demands and trade volumes. In this regard this product recorded the highest increase in price, so that for some grades it was 3.3% and in some others 3.4%!

The GPS 1540 with 1.3% increase in respect to the base price, also as compared to its former week’s price record the second category after various grades of PET bottles in price increase.

All sorts of PVCs, including S57, S60, S65, S7054, ranked third with almost 1.1% increase in prices.

The other conclusions could be verified by deeper analyzing of the following table belonging to the comparison between the last week’s determined base prices and that of this week. Though, the free market goes its own way with much higher prices based on demands and availability.

Table I: Comparison between May 6th and May 13th 2018 base prices determined by PDID office: