Production and sales of chemicals for industrial use fall in 2014

The main volume indices of industrial chemicals closed 2014 with negative results. The production fell 4.55 percent and domestic sales, 4.02% in comparison with the previous year, as the report points out economics and statistics team of the Brazilian chemical industry Association (Abiquim). According to the Director of the team, Fatima Giovanna Coviello Ferreira, expressive part of this result is associated with reduction of national economic activity, marked from the second half of 2014.

Important customer segments, such as civil construction, oil/gas and automotive, dramatically reduced activity, generating impact on chemical chain. "The chemicals are at the base of various industrial chains. Therefore, its multiplier effect is expressive in the economy, "explains the Director of Economics and statistics.
Despite the poor showing result of GDP and industrial activity, negative apparent consumption (CAN), National important measure of national demand for chemicals, surged from 0.5% in 2014, in comparison with the previous year. In this scenario, once again if imports benefited from the improvement in domestic demand. According to the report by Abiquim, the volume of imported industrial chemicals rose expressive 9.3% last year, despite the devaluation of the real against the dollar. In addition, another record was achieved in 2014: the participation of imports about CAN reached 35.7%. "The high level of imports shows that, in addition to taking advantage of the increased demand, imports are also increasingly occupying a space that was once the national producer," says Fatima Giovanna.

While imports of chemical products manufactured locally are growing sharply, the idleness of the Brazilian plants remains at high levels. In 2014, the industry production fell 4.6 percent and the average rate of occupancy was 79%, three points below the previous year. "Idleness exceeding 20% concerned especially by the feature of continuous process operation. These plants should be operating between 87% and 90%, "says the Director of Abiquim.

With respect to preliminary data January 2015, as the last quarter of last year was very negative, the production index showed high of 0.28 percent over the previous month, however, about January 2014, the indentation is 2.50%. In the case of internal sales index, January had expressive result with 17.89% increase over December, but also on the basis of bad fourth quarter of 2014. In comparison with January 2014, the index presents indentation of 6.64 percent. How to CAN, in the first month of the year registered 7.9% drop on January 2014. In the same comparison, output fell 4.74 percent and domestic sales, 4.64%.