David Shaw's Editors' Blog
Why rubber prices are so high18 February 2011 | 
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Ever heard of a super trader? That person may be the reason rubber prices are so high.
There is a little-known phenomenon in the rubber-growing belt of south-east Asia, whereby a few individuals can, in a coordinated manner, manipulate the price of NR.
They are the super-traders. But they do not inhabit the trading floors of Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. Instead, they inhabit the plantations and smallholdings around the rubber groves.
Like a Western loan shark, a supertrader's agent will go to a smallholder and give him a cash advance. The smallholder needs a new motorbike? Ask the agent. Need school fees? Ask the agent.
In exchange for this cash advance, the small holder has to deliver a certain amount of cup lump over the next week or two.
It's an attractive deal for the smallholder. Instead of having to tap each day and take the cup lump to a processing plant, the super trader comes to his door, gives him an advance and then arrives to collect the rubber a few days later.
Seems simple and innocuous enough, until you start to understand the scope and scale of the supertraders.
A single super-trader might use a few hundred agents, each going around a village or two.
The trader can then buy up the cup lump, hang on to it for a week or two, until prices have risen, and then sell. He makes a healthy profit.
Even this would not be too bad, but when you realise that these supertraders co-ordinate activity across regions, and throughout Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Then the magnitude of the problem starts to take on a new meaning.
Imagine a few dozen individuals, each of whom has hundreds of agents buying up cup lump. Storing that lump in warehouses of 10 000 tonnes a time, keeping the processing plants short. And then think that these individuals all hold on to just enough of their rubber with the deliberate intent of driving prices higher.
Those processing houses know all about the super-traders. But there is nothing they can do because – in Malaysian law – they are forbidden from going to the smallholders. Unfortunately for them, most of the professional processors have struck long-term deals with the tyre makers. And if they cannot get the rubber at the farmgate, then they have to go to open markets and pay a premium, in order to fulfill their supply contracts.
So they have to pay premium rates to get the rubber to pass on to the tyre makers. That pushes up prices and the super traders have won.
Worse, the processing houses receive second-grade rubber contaminated with soil, stones, and other material which increases the weight of the goods sold. That adds a processing step and an expense to the processors operations.
The super traders monitor the price and release enough rubber to keep the market short, but not too short and keep driving the prices higher. They can buy low and sell high. A classic winning strategy for a trader.
However, in most open markets, trading is transparent and free. In this new market, the trade is completely controlled by a few, well-coordinated individuals.
Highly co-ordinated supertraders are a new phenomenon. It appears that they emerged first around the start of 2008. Few in the NR sector understood the sharp rise in prices in the first half of 2008. We, in the trade, put it down to demand and weather and other factors, In fact, it seems it was the super traders first starting to appear.
Prices collapsed in late 2008, with the western recession. But the super traders had learned how effective and profitable their strategy could be. And I think they are now manipulating the supply of rubber to global markets, affecting the global price.
I'm not sure anyone in the NR trade has a good explanation of why prices are so high. We mutter about floods and drought and El Nino and unprecedented demand from China, but in our hearts, we know these are merely contributory factors. They do not explain the impossibly high prices.
The evidence for that is that the big processing houses across the rubber growing belt are getting less rubber than they need or expect. Factories which should be converting cup lump to SMR 20 are lying idle, because they do not have the rubber to process. This is not a symptom of over-capacity. It is a symptom of under-supply. But the trees are still there and they are still being tapped.
It's just that the super-traders are hoarding the material, keeping the market short.
We know that Indian smallholders routinely withhold their rubber from the markets over timescales of a few weeks in the hope of increased prices, but because these smallholders do not act in a coordinated way, the effect is small.
Once the price reaches a certain level one or two of the smallholders will go to the market and sell, this drives the prices down, which leads to more selling by other smallholders and this drives the limited rising and falling markets in India.
What seems to be happening across South East Asia is that these supertraders have taken the Indian model to a much higher level, with up to a million tonnes of rubber stored and are acting in a coordinated way to drive prices higher. When they agree to hold on to the rubber, and no-one blinks, the price is driven inexorably higher.
Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of a super-trader. I did not know of the phenomenon. You only learn about it if you are on the ground among the rubber groves, asking smallholders if they have material to sell.
Fewer of us are doing that nowadays, as the old hands of rubber purchasing retire, while their successors increasingly inhabit air-conditioned offices and trading screens.
And that has given the super-traders an unrivalled opportunity to exploit our vulnerability.
To be honest, I am not sure there is much we can do about it. It seems, however, that this offers some kind of explanation of the increasing prices, which I had never heard before a few days ago.
If you have comments, contact me at dshaw@crain.com
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Postscript from ERJ Jan-Feb 201022 February 2010 | 0 comments
Since this is the first article I have to write in a new decade, I thought I might take a look back over the last 10 years and then extrapolate forward a few years.
Looking through the issues of ERJ from 10 years ago, I am struck by the similarity in stories.
One of the top stories from January 2000 was the break-up of BTR's automotive division following the merger of BTR and Siebe, to form Invensys. This was the business that included the Henniges and Schlegel brands in the sealing business.
There has been no stability in that business. We have seen in just the last few months, that the Indian company controlled by the Ruia brothers has bought significant parts of that empire, which has changed hands a number of times in the intervening years. This event on its own underlines one of the major trends in the industry and that is the steady decline of many of the great Western names of the past, which have been acquired by wealthy private owners based in the developing world.
These are strong names, carrying a long and noble brand history. Back then, they had been starved of investment and run down as cost-conscious management aimed to extract the last ounce of profit from the businesses.
It is a trend we saw in the 1980s when Japanese tyre makers wanted to enter the global playing field, and the story was exactly the same.
In that decade Bridgestone bought Firestone while Sumitomo bought the Dunlop activities. Sumitomo still retains the Dunlop brand in parts of the world, but they eventually sold much of it back to Goodyear. Meanwhile Bridgestone had a bad experience with Firestone brand tyres, born out of lack of technology and has gradually all but dropped the Firestone brand.
Today, we are once more seeing Asian companies buying established Western brands. Many industrial commentators in the west see little value in the manufacturing activities of these assets. They have old and anachronistic factories in high-cost regions of the world. The labour forces are entrenched in their practices, highly unionised and unwilling to implement significant change.
By contrast, greenfield factories set up in Asia and other developing parts of the world offer modern factory design, highly automated production and a willing and flexible workforce who are very happy with wages that western workers would find insulting. The new owners are not buying production and productivity, They are buying brand and heritage. It remains to be seen if the Ruia brothers will be any more successful than either Sumitomo or Bridgestone in integrating their new acquisitions and then leveraging the brand credibility they have bought. The other big story of 2000 was Pirelli's MIRS tyre production system. This launched in September of that year.
Not much has developed on that front. Pirelli still loves its MIRS system, though I keep hearing rumours that MIRS is relatively expensive way to make tyres.
This month, I'm writing about a process with very similar aims – VMI's MTM system. I've thought for a long time – ever since I first met Eric Holroyd – that small volume, highly flexible, operator-free tyre manufacture would be the future of high-added-value tyres – and also of more standard tyre production.
Michelin got there first with the C3M. That's being used routinely to make high added value tyres, such as those used on Bugatti's Veyron. And if you need to ask how much a set of those costs, then you can't afford them.
Word has it that C3M works, but it's a bit unreliable and in terms of cost of production per unit, not competitive with Michelin's high flexibility standard system.
Then Pirelli came up with the robotic system called MIRS. It's more competitive than C3M, and has been installed in greater numbers, but the unit cost remains higher than more conventional systems.
In both of these cases, it was the engineers who developed and built the system using resources which were, in project terms, relatively loose on the cash front. Trouble is that tyre building is a complex process handling a range of different materials and the early attempts at developing solutions based on mechanical engineering simply weren't good enough.
On the other hand, computers, optical recognition, electronic communication and servo motors have been developing very rapidly in the last two decades
We're now ten years beyond MIRS and, it may be that we need another decade before control technology is fast enough and cheap enough to make fully automated tyre building a real, economically viable possibility, but I have a suspicion that the MTM might have got there at just the right time.
It's certainly the right time commercially. It brings together all the trends – Single mould tyres; demand pull production; rapid development times; enhanced customisation and of course, highly flexible hands-off production.
Will this be the one to change the industry – only another decade will tell, but the signs are there, if anyone cares to read them.
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You learn something new every day...04 December 2009 | 0 comments
One of the things I like best about this job is finding something new to write about. Having been editor of this magazine for something over 20 years, it sometimes feels quite repetitive. However, this month,I've felt really privileged to report on a couple of interesting developments from fields outside the normal areas of interest.
The first is, for me, completely wonderful. This is the project to sequence the genome of the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis. I've heard rumours for some years that this project is under discussion. Last March when I visited Kuala Lumpur, the head of Malaysia's rubber organisation told me that it was a serious project and that one of the aims is to make a transgenic plant.
Currently the rubber tree produces a great deal of water, some polyisoprene and some proteins. These come together in the latex ducts and are tapped for eventual manufacture into gloves, balloons, condoms and latex thread. Unfortunately, those proteins have caused some problems with allergies in some sensitised individuals.
The vision of the Malaysian Rubber Board (LGM) was to create a transgenic species which makes useful proteins instead of the potentially harmful ones. Beyond merely avoiding allergies and sensitisation, the Malaysians have a wide vision which includes making insulin and other proteins in the rubber tree.
Currently, insulin used to treat diabetes is made in pigs and other animals. There is a large population of humans who find it difficult to find a compromise between the need to keep themselves healthy with artificial insulin and the thought of having that medicine made in other animals. Personally I'd be a bit ambivalent about it too.
As soon as I heard of the plan to use genetic engineering to make these kinds of proteins, I realised that there is a bigger vision than just rubber going on in Malaysia, and I welcome that.
The first step on the road to that vision is now complete. It has to be said that the vision of the scientists who completed the genome sequence is much more limited than that of the LGM, but nevertheless, understanding the genetic origins of traits such as disease-resistance, yield and other attributes will prove a major step forward for the agronomists, and will, in my opinion, reduce the probability of a natural rubber shortage into the future.
When we understand the genome correctly, we'll be able to use conventional breeding programmes to create trees which can grow outside the traditional rubber growing band, and more importantly, check for their suitability almost as soon as the sapling has germinated, rather than waiting seven to ten years to find out the characteristics of the tree.
The other development I enjoyed learning about is the electro-active elastomer. If you take a thin sheet of an insulating elastomer and apply a strong electric field through the thickness, then it gets thinner and grows in area. I'd never heard of this effect before, despite 20-odd years in the business, but it seems it's a well-known phenomenon.
The challenge for the industry is to create films which are just a few microns in thickness. If anyone out there has a technology for making rubbery films that thin, then I know a lot of researchers who would be very keen to talk with you about electrical properties.
The requirement is for an elastomer which offers very good elastic properties, with limited viscous properties. It must be a good electrical insulator and highly elastic. And it must be possible to make it in very thin sheets.
I'm told there is a strong potential market for actuators made using such thin films. And in these times of lean profits, that has to be an interesting prospect.
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The scale of the problem15 June 2009 | 1 comments
Right from the start, I don’t have a hope of saying when this crisis might end. I’m not sure anyone in this business even knows the scale of the problem, let alone has any sensible idea of when it might start to ease.
This month, I wanted to try to put the crisisrecession-downturn into some kind of perspective, and clarify which sectors have been worst affected, and those which remain bouyant. Finally, I wanted to offer advice taken from some of the rubber industry’s business leaders over the last few months.
It is clear that the automotive sector – and especially the commercial vehicle side of the business — has been hit worst. Most of the world’s largest truck makers are located in Western Europe. That has meant suppliers based in this region have been hit especially hard.
ACEA says truck registrations in Europe are down by around 40 percent. But that is just the local market. Michelin says April saw European sales of OE truck tyres down by 75 percent on this time last year, and by 66 percent for the first four months. These numbers are more representative, as they includes the trucks made here for export to other regions.
The monthly numbers for Japan and North America are marginally less bad, but they follow on from a sustained period of declining markets. Even the Latin American market which has been growing strongly in recent years took a sharp reverse. China is showing flat demand for trucks at best.
At least the tyre makers have their replacement businesses to fall back on. Suppliers of air springs; hoses, vibration control systems and other products aimed at the heavy vehicle sector are all facing a bleak summer, with little prospect of recovery anywhere in the world in the short term.
While the car sector might feel like a disaster area, it is not as bad as truck. Nevertheless, with Opel up for sale, and a strong possibility that GM will join Chrysler in the bankruptcy courts, the crisis among car industry suppliers is extreme. ACEA shows European registrations down by 16 percent in the first four months of the year, while Michelin shows overall OE deliveries in Europe running almost 40 percent below the levels of 2008.
In the car market, North American numbers are even worse than the European figures. There is some indication that China is making more cars, ready for export, but that recovery offers little hope to suppliers based in the West.
Up to now, the construction market has been little affected by the downturn, but the signs are not good. Large building projects often take more than a year to complete. This time lag means many of the large construction projects currently seeking seals for glazing and sewerage were started before the crisis hit home. Reports suggest that many of the projects due to be signed off in the last six months have been delayed and put on hold.
The continuing flow of business on existing projects is good, but those exposed to the construction markets need to prepare now for difficult times ahead.
On the positive side, two sectors important to the rubber industry appear relatively unaffected.
Agriculture and healthcare continue to grow, apparently oblivious to the storms sweeping through the rest of the industrial sector.
Geographically, of course, China continues to grow, while India, after a brief stutter at the turn of the year is now recovering strongly. The Middle East is also seen as a strong growth area.
What to do
For those exposed to the automotive sector and the developed markets, early action was important.
Realising that the downturn was going to be deeper and harder than the economists predicted was the first attribute of the successful manager.
To that end, those who recognised first that cash would become king, are likely to do well. Cuts in capital expenditure were the first and easiest savings. More difficult was choosing between taking orders and incurring bad debts.
Everyone has now had to make hard decisions about the financial viability of their business partners. This has meant being more open about financial strength than ever before.
In some cases, this has strengthened pre-existing business relationships. In others, the insistence on paying cash up front has led to difficulties.
Communicating these business issues to the workforce was also a necessary step. Underlining that when the recovery — eventually — comes, the longterm success of the business depends on its ability to retain good people.
On the other hand, extended reductions in the order book has meant pain, and that pain has been shared throughout the organisation. When the recovery comes, managements should not forget the sacrifices made by their workforces, which helped bring the company through the crisis.
Finally, the need for speed. While some projects have been cancelled, others, deemed vital to corporate success have been brought forward. If, as a supplier, you can help your customer to achieve his goals earlier than originally planned, your contribution will be recognised.
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Recycling and the rubber industry11 February 2009 | 0 comments
One of the first things a new recruit learns upon joining the rubber industry is that rubber can’t be recycled. It’s a thermoset. When it’s cured, a chemical reaction takes place which changes the nature of the material forever. That’s what everyone in the rubber industry is taught, and that is what everyone knows.
Every few months an entrepreneur pops up and claims that the latest technology — whether it be crumbing or pyrolysis or something else — can produce material that can be used in rubber goods with no reduction in the properties of the vulcanisate.
We have all learned to ignore them. We know that rubber crumb is a nightmare to work with and that scrap tyres are contaminated with all kinds of unpleasant chemicals.
We might just be wrong.
Not about scrap tyres, but about post-industrial scrap.
Scrap tyres are post-consumer waste. The mix of truck tyres and high performance car tyres dramatically affects the final properties of the mix; also the granulation process affects the processing performance and then there is the risk of contamination either by engine oils or by steel fibres.
Like everyone who reads this, I have more or less written off this source of recycled material, except for kids’ playgrounds and other low-grade applications.
Behind the wheeler-dealers who process postconsumer tyres, there are a few — a very few — companies who are attempting to process postindustrial scrap.
How much scrap does the typical rubber factory produce? If you measure it by the reject rate, then typically less than 2 percent of volume.
However, the reject rate is the smallest source of scrap rubber. If a tonne of rubber compound comes out of the mixer, often only 700 kg or even less is shipped out as finished product. The other 300 kg emerges as process scrap in the form of sprue, blank stampings, edgings, grade-change products and suchlike.
We don’t count it as scrap, because it is costed in to the production process. Nevertheless, it ends up in the waste bin. For want of a better word, I’ll use the term process waste to describe this cured material.
If there were a method of reversing the curing process, would it make sense to use the process waste as an ingredient in the virgin compound? The answer, in these times of intense cost pressure, is yes — at least in theory.
There are difficulties, not least the technology of reversing the curing reaction.
Another difficulty is that adding post-processed scrap will change the properties of the compound.
This might seem to limit the options for using process waste, but those who have tried, have discovered that re-formulating is relatively easy, because the new ingredient is well defined in terms of properties and ingredients.
This post-industrial scrap does not suffer from any of the drawbacks of post-consumer tyres. The postindustrial material is well known and well-understood. It is consistent from batch to batch and from year to year. It is not granulated, but rather comes in sheet form, ready for the mill.
Mouldings and stampings made from FKM, HNBR and other technical elastomers tend to generate a lot of process waste. Because of the high value of these polymers, it makes sense for companies to research every possible way to minimise that scrap.
If I said that highly technical users of high-value elastomeric materials are at this moment, using their own vulcanised process waste in their finished products, would it help to persuade you?
If there is a question, it is over the technique and equipment used to re-process the waste. I have in recent weeks seen two systems which claim to do this. Their customers verify that the resulting material can be used as an alternative ingredient in virgin compound.
In each case, the key element is carefully controlled mechanical stressing of the process waste. One proprietary process uses a special chemical which is said to improve the efficiency of the process, but works on a simple two-roll mill. The other uses a speciallydesigned machine to apply a specific stress regime to the materials.
This industry has learned too well that vulcanised rubber cannot be re-used. It has had its fingers burned by charlatans — who do not understand the first thing about rubber — making outrageous claims. But now there are processes and equipment out there which, in the right circumstances can deliver highly cost-effective results.
In these difficult times, we can’t let our prejudices blind us to the possibilities.
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