Sentiment cautiously recovers in Turkey’s PP market

Turkey’s PP market was on a bearish trend in the last 2 months given muted demand heading to the year-end amidst sufficient inventories on part of manufacturers. However, the market gave signals of a recovery starting from the second half of last week since easing stock pressure on sellers encouraged them to adopt a firmer stance on their pricing.

“PP suppliers are not willing to export much volume to Turkey, citing the low netbacks compared to other global markets and this has helped the sentiment in the local market improve. Petkim is no longer aggressive and is not providing the previous competitive prices thanks to their vivid sales in the last couple of weeks, which reduced their stock pressure,” players commented.

A PP converter confirmed, “Sellers are trying to lift the market these days and this has generated some buying interest. We are receiving fewer calls from sellers while most of them claim having limited material left on hand.”

A trader, meanwhile, deemed the recent firming as a slight upwards correction, adding; “PP prices fell too much previously and sellers are likely to follow a firmer policy in the coming days in order not to give away further losses. Middle Eastern producers prefer to keep their allocations restricted to Turkey considering better netbacks provided by other export destinations, while some traders were not able to receive fresh offers from Iran either this week.”

The locally-held PP market was reported at $1430-1460/ton ex-warehouse Turkey, cash inc VAT for raffia, while fibre prices stood at $1460-1480/ton with the same terms. These ranges indicated increases of $20-30/ton on the low ends, respectively on a weekly comparison.