Considerable Polymer Price Decrease In Iran While Trade Volume Is Up

As the article written by Ahmad Ali Saatnia shows (Click Here), although the converters are confused whether to switch on production or not, however the trading volume and welcoming the IME tender offers were hot enough to break last years’ number of bids (214 times).

Today, on Sunday April 12th, the PDID Office of NPC organized the pricing committee to declare the new polymer prices for a week till Sat. evening April 18th. For this week, not only we had the global price decreases but there was also a decrease of about 1.91% for the official value of the US$. This decrease put the US$ value at Rials 136.334 and so calculations made on this basis.

Due to this downfall factors at the base prices of the polymers, almost all official prices (except for 3 grades of HDPE) went down from 11.41 to 0.38%. Table 1 shows the new prices and its comparison changes.

Table I: The polymers base prices for the two periods of previous weeks

One may ask that how it is possible that when the production is shut down and under threat of totally close up for many small and medium size factories, the welcoming of material purchasing would be so hot? We can say that, this is the result of inefficient stock exchange that is more under the control of market manipulators.

The fact is that during the last three weeks of our previous year when the market mediators watched the continuation of the price increases and guessed that some polymers will be competitive due to outbreak of COVID-19, then purchasing and stocking of the materials will make them more wealthy. But after the new year they practically faced with a downturn market price and lack of interest in true consumer to buy their materials from the black market.

They lost a lot in practice and now in order to make a balance in their dirty investments, they are purchasing cheaper materials and adding it to their present stocks.

During last week (April 5-11th) there were 214 tenders at IME out which 179 bids were successful. These are the figures that have been missing for several months. The noticeable point is that all dealers have been highly conservative in their highest volume tradings at one bid. Tale II shows the first 5 ranking materials that were purchased at one tender, and table III shows the total trading figures during last week.

Table II: The first 5 polymer types that purchased at once in one bid.

Table III: All figures, including ODtv indexes for trading volumes of 179 tenders during last week.