Are Iranian Petrochemicals Going to Defend Trump Re-Election?

Today, Sun. Feb. 2nd 2020, the new base prices for majority of polymers and petrochemicals were announced by the pricing committee of NPC.

Since most grades and groups of polymers and petrochemicals faced again with incremental trend, so, some political and economic experts are in doubt that perhaps the main decision makers in Iran’s petrochemicals market are happy of President Donald Trump’s destructive actions against Iran’s economic interests, and may support his re-election for another four years at the helm of the decision-making pyramid of massive US economic / military power.
In this regard, let’s see how such a doubt arose for a powerful Iranian media group (PIM Media Group)?
Today, as pointed above, The PDID Office of NPC announced the new base prices for polymer materials for the next week. These prices are valid until the next prices would be announced on Sunday, February 9th.
Since May 2017, the PDID Office announces the prices of polymeric materials on a weekly basis for trading of materials that are either on the phase of competitiveness or are in shortage and should only be sold at the petrochemical hall of IME.
To discover basic prices, the PDID office usually uses two factors. The average global price of polymers is the first factor used to discover base prices. This week, global prices remained stable for the week, with no significant changes in global markets, especially in the polyethylene, polypropylene, ordinary polystyrene and ABS commodity plastics.The second factor in the base price discovery formula is the average value of US$ at the official market which is under the control of CBI. This, in Iranian market, is known as “NIMA Rate”
This week’s NIMA rate value of US dollar average was like all other last 9 weeks, and so, for the 10th consecutive week, this rate has been incremental. For this week, the average value rose for 119.1 Rials over the past week, implying about 1% increase in the price of polymers. In this regard, the US dollar exchange rate calculated at 121,497 Rials, Now, based on this let’s see the price changes at table I.

Analysis:

As far as we go further, the sanctions over Iran get tougher, the businesses are being more complicated and difficult and injection of the foreign currencies to the Iranian economy and the CBI’s reservoirs are being much more difficult. At the same time selling of the crude oil, not only is now more difficult and too risky but it is no more a privilege. In this complicated situation for the country’s economy the petrochemical materials are the biggest hopes for a guaranteed FOREX source. However and due to lack of private currency exchange shops, the petrochemical units are the main hopes of the country’s needs to FOREX.

In the PIMI Editorial Team’s view, the gradual increase in the Iranian made polymers’ prices will result in losing the market and transferring it to the competitors. In table I you will see all bids run between Sun.

Table III: Last week’s (Jan. 26-Feb. 2nd.) trade figures at IME hall, including prices and ODTv indexes