ChemInsight 360

Westlake exits Cologne, Vynova faces a December deadline, and Asian PVC fills the gap left by US and Egyptian cargoes

*The Q3 Rally Breaks: Supply, Demand and Cost Turn Together

Market review of Q3 (CY) 2026, the mid-October correction, and the outlook for Q4 (CY)*

*The duty will cut China's melamine exports to India. But melamine is made from urea, and India will now

need more urea to make its own melamine. China's export simply changes its coat: from melamine to urea.

For China's urea market, the impact is very small. For Indian panel makers, the cost pain is real.*

Chip making uses seven groups of chemicals. Together they are worth more than US$20 billion in 2026, out of a US$48.9 billion wafer-fab materials market. Electronic gases (US$6.8 bn) and wet chemicals (US$4.1 bn) are the biggest by volume. Photoresist plus its ancillary materials (US$6.9 bn) is the hardest to make and the most protected.

Fastest-expanding chlorine derivative in China. ECH capacity rose from 2,122 kt to 3,425 kt in five years (10.05% CAGR). China now holds more than 80% of global capacity (global 4,126 kt in 2025).

The Kigali freeze is a wall for capacity that is not built, and a moat for capacity that is. December 2027 is the last day anyone can buy a seat at the Indian R32 table and the ticket is feedstock, not quota.

A chip is a physics device made possible by chemistry. Every etch, clean, deposition, polish and exposure step runs on a material that must be purer, flatter, thinner or more selective than the step before. This Sector Scan maps that materials layer from first principles to market structure, built from AJC field work across the Chinese semiconductor-materials ecosystem, the largest expansion theatre in the world today for chemical manufacturers, investors and strategy teams that need to place the sector in a chemicals frame.

SMS Pharmaceuticals has changed the economics of its ibuprofen business. AJC’s India Desk work over the past fortnight shows the company has completed backward integration into isobutylbenzene (IBB) and now runs the entire ibuprofen API chain in-house: IBB, IBAP and API. With integration done, plant engineering, process innovation and batch scale are doing the rest, and AJC now regards SMS as a fully integrated producer and one of the most cost-competitive ibuprofen API manufacturers in the world.

*Saudi Aramco has indefinitely suspended term crude deliveries to Indian refiners (~9% of India's crude basket) and told all European term customers they will receive zero crude for October.

Trigger: the 1,200-km East-West pipeline (up to 7 mb/d, Abqaiq to Yanbu) has been offline since a 10 Sep drone strike. Three pumping stations damaged; full repair up to six weeks. No Saudi crude has left Yanbu since 11 Sep.*