MOSCOW (MRC) -- AOC (Collierville, Tennessee) has announced an increase in prices for its entire unsaturated polyester resins (UPR) and epoxy vinyl ester (EVE) portfolio in the EAME region, due to the continued growth in feedstock, logistics, and packaging costs, reported Chemweek.
The company says the announced price rise of EUR350/metric ton (USD417/metric ton) is with immediate effect for all new orders, or as soon as contracts allow.
“The availability of key raw materials from our contract suppliers has been severely hampered and we are having to resort to other, more expensive, sources,” says Fons Harbers, EAME vice president/marketing and sales at AOC. “Also, logistics and packaging costs have been increasing steadily. This leaves us no choice but to raise the prices of our products further as a result, realizing that supply can be somewhat irregular given these new supply routes,” he says.
As MRC wrote before, earlier this month, AOC already announced a price rise for the same products, saying that pricing of raw materials such as styrene, maleic anhydride, liquid epoxy resins, and others had experienced continued increases in recent months following global outages and force majeure declarations in Europe. It had also previously announced increases for the same products in January and February this year.
As MRC informed earlier, in October 2020, AOC, Kaprain and Spolchemie announced they had reached agreement on AOC acquiring the Unsaturated Polyester Resin (UPR) manufacturing operations located at the Spolchemie site in Usti nad Labem (Czech Republic). This footprint extension will allow AOC to further improve service and logistics to its customers in Central/ Eastern Europe as well as in Germany, and will make new products (e.g. based on recycled PET) available for customers around Europe.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, overall estimated PET consumption in Russia was 71,830 tonnes in December 2020, up by 8% year on year. Russia's PET consumption in all sectors (injection moulding, fibers/filaments, films) exceeded the level of 2019 by 17%, totalling 717,310 tonnes.
MRC