Sinopec reports drop in SR sales

Beijing –China’s Sinopec has issued its annual statement for the year ending 31 Dec 2014, announcing a loss of 2.16 billion renminbi (€319 million) in its chemical segment. The segment produced an operating profit of Rmb631 million in 2013.

Synthetic rubber sales in the company dropped from 1,346 thousand tonnes to 1,205 thousand tonnes, a drop of 10.5 percent. ?

Sinopec said that chemical prices declined continuously in 2014, with the second half of the year seeing a bigger decrease in feedstock costs than in chemical prices, thus improving margins.

According to the company’s statistics, the apparent consumption of synthetic rubber fell by 1.9 percent in 2014.

Sinopec’s output of synthetic rubber decreased by 2.2 percent, to 939,000 thousand tonnes in 2014 while production of monomers and polymers for synthetic fibres decreased 9.1 percent, to 8.38 million tonnes.

Sales revenue generated by the segment’s six major categories of chemical products – includingsynthetic rubber as well as synthetic fibre monomer and polymer – totalled Rmb 405.4 billion, representing a decrease of 2.6 percent as compared with 2013, and accounting for 94.8 percent of the operating revenues of the segment.?

Sinopec’s capital expenditure was Rmb154.6 billion in 2014, and the chemicals business accounted for Rmb15.85 billion of the total. Capital spending in 2015 in the chemicals segment will be about Rmb15.1 billion, according to Sinopec.