Polycarbonate (PC) is a kind of durable thermoplastic engineering plastic with excellent comprehensive properties. China's PC industry has undergone tremendous changes in the past two decades, and has made great progress in demand, supply and technology. It is expected that China's PC industry will face a new development trend in the next five years.

1. The rapid release of domestic production capacity will rapidly increase the self-sufficiency rate

In the past decade, with the foreign companies represented by Covestro, Teijin and Mitsubishi and the domestic enterprises represented by Zhejiang Tie Fengfeng, Luxi Chemical and Wanhua Chemical successively putting in domestic production capacity, China's PC supply has achieved considerable development. It is expected that by 2025, China's total PC production capacity is expected to reach 4.73 million t/a, with an average annual capacity growth rate of more than 20%.

2. Structural excess and structural shortage will coexist

It is expected that the net import volume of PC in China will gradually decrease from 2021, and the total domestic output will reach or even exceed the total demand in 2025 to achieve the overall balance of supply and demand.

However, this supply and demand balance will actually be a dynamic balance, and there will be overcapacity in some subdivided applications, especially in the traditional low-end traditional bulk applications, such as PC resins for plates and general modifications and alloys. Other areas still need to be filled by large imports.

Therefore, it is expected that by 2025, there will still be no less than 500,000 t of domestic PC needs to be imported, and most of the terminal applications are concentrated in the high-end and high value-added fields. At the same time, in the next few years, the domestic PC exports will also show a rapid growth trend. It is expected that by 2025, the total amount of domestic export PC will not be less than 500,000 t. However, due to the inability to build competitive advantages in multiple dimensions such as quality, service and certification, exports will make more use of price advantages, mainly concentrated in low-end and price-sensitive fields.

3. Integration and scale will build comprehensive competitive advantages

In the future, enterprises with upstream and downstream integration advantages will have greater anti-risk ability; In addition, the more upstream supporting enterprises, the larger the capacity of PC. At that time, those production enterprises with integrated industrial chain supporting and large-scale industrial scale will form comprehensive competitive advantages in risk resistance and comprehensive cost. At present, the upstream and downstream supporting situation of domestic PC devices is shown in Table 2.

4. General purpose PC will be bulk, modified PC will be universal

Due to the gradual expansion of production and consumption, PC materials have begun to have the characteristics of "bulk plastic products" : large trading volume, general materials, low-end product performance gradually convergence and standardization, processing technology gradually mature, professional technology dependence continues to reduce.

Not only the general PC gradually bulk, some modified PC products also began to gradually move towards general use, such as the typical UL94 1.5mmV0 grade flame retardant PC and flame retardant PC/ABS products, not only each modified company has a corresponding product, and even different downstream application industries often use the same grade of modified PC products. For example, the UL94 1.5mmV0 grade flame-retardant PC with a fuse reference of 10 is not only used in the shell of various power contact equipment, but also in other parts and components with fire protection requirements.

5. Differentiated demand for high-end applications will become more obvious

With the rapid development of the PC industry, we should also see that the differentiation of PC products in the future will be very obvious. For example: mobile phone. In the middle frame of mobile phone, a large number of glass fiber reinforced PC products are used; In the back of the mobile phone, according to the different product design, mainly use hardened PC, ordinary PC and PC alloy products; For mobile phone chargers, UL94 1.5mmV0 grade is mainly used to put flame retardant PC products. The charging bank uses a large number of UL94 1.5mmV0 flame-retardant PC/ABS products; A large number of silicon-containing copolymerized PC products and LDS PC products are used for wireless headphones supporting mobile phones. As a gateway device, routers and CPE, etc., also use a large number of flame-retardant PC and flame-retardant PC/ABS products.

In addition, a variety of PC products with different functions and additional attributes will be more and more applied to various fields. For example, in the field of myopia lenses and cameras, a large number of high-refraction PC products with a refractive index of 1.64 or even more than 1.7 are used. In the field of lenses, light guides and other fields with higher heat resistance requirements, the thermal deformation temperature is as high as 180 ° C, or even more than 200 ° C. In extremely cold application scenarios, a large number of low-temperature PC products are used at -40 ° C, or even -60 ° C, which can still maintain high impact performance. In the application scenario with anti-static requirements, anti-static PC products with surface resistance of 106~ 1012ω.cm are usually used. In the field of automotive interior parts, PC alloy products with lower odor levels are used.

6. The price will shift from market-oriented to cost-oriented

Domestic PC has long relied on imports, and before the first 10,000-ton PC device was put into production in 2005, almost 100% relied on imports. Even after 2005, the rapid release of domestic production capacity, its import dependence has been maintained at a high level of more than 60% before 2016, China's PC import dependence is shown in Figure 6.

Long-term dependence on imports has kept the supply of PCS in a tight balance. In the five years from 2013 to 2018, the PC industry has always been in a high profit state, except for a brief period of loss due to high oil prices in 2014. The price correlation coefficient between PC and major upstream raw materials (2013-2018) is shown in Table 3.

It is expected that in the future, with the further release of domestic PC production capacity, domestic PC will be maintained with bisphenol A for a long time within the difference range of 3000~5000 yuan/t, and the price of PC has shifted from market-oriented to cost-oriented.