The issue of stopping feed delivery to the petrochemical complexes is becoming a serious crisis. This has now triggered urgent measures by the Iranian Parliament and confronted the Minister of IMT and the Stock Exchange of Iran.
The crisis is due to the gradual increase in the prices of polymer materials and some other petrochemicals up to three times more than the official prices. In fact, following the protests of the down-stream industries of the petrochemical units in the field of raw material shortages and shutting down of the two working shifts (16 hours) out of the three shift works of the converting factories, and even the closure of some of them in some industrial townships, the government was forced to urgently deal with this issue.
The main issue also began with the devaluation of the national currency (Rial) against the US dollar and then other currencies. The reason is that after exporting crude oil and gas, exporting petrochemicals can be one of the main sources of supplying the country with foreign currencies. These exports and the delay in returning huge sums of currencies to the country have been on public protests since about two months ago. On the one hand, the Iranian government, which owned the entire petrochemical industry as the national industry, following the first wave of sanctions in the Ahmadinejad government, managed the virtually ownership of these industries as private units (2009-2010) with the removal of the national title of the NIPC on the pretext of enforcing Article 44 of the Constitution. On the other hand, these companies have gradually taken their private property claims and rejected many of the orders of the clerical government. The result was that the vast amount of foreign exchange earned from the export of petrochemicals did not return to the country, and at the same time, lower quantities of the raw materials were supplied for the Iranian converting industries resulting in domestic material shortage and higher prices.

As a result, the issue of the shortage of polymer materials, rising prices by up to three times, and the export of smuggling of polymeric materials have led to protests by the members of the Parliament and the industry owners regarding the price of petrochemicals.
For a long time, despite the increase in the exchange value of the foreign currencies with respect to the Iranian Rial, the feed-stocks of the petrochemicals are calculated at a constant price of Rls. 38.000 (current official rate per dollar is 42,000 Rls.). At the same time, petrochemicals only return a few amount of currencies from their export sources to the domestic market and refrain from transferring it to the country. Along with that, they have been pushing for price increases on the commodity markets.
This is not all the same because, with the unanimous efforts of the petrochemicals, now the IRI Parliament is addressing this position, the Minister of IMT has been involved with the stock exchange, and in the same circumstances, due to the cost of petrochemicals, the sale of materials to the factories has been stopped.
This means stopping downstream petrochemical industries and closing down many of them.

The following table shows the latest official prices defined today by the PDID office.