JSR reports continuing fall in elastomer sales

Tokyo – JSR has reported year-on-year monthly sales declines of around 15 percent for March, May and June, and a 5-percent decline in April, at its Petrochemicals Business.

“The sales of Elastomer business and Plastics business fell down YoY due to fall in sales prices under the stronger yen and so on, even though the sales volume remained flat YoY,”  explained a trading update.

JSR’s rubber portfolio includes: styrene-butadiene rubbers (ESBR and SSBR), polybutadiene rubber, polyisoprene, nitrile rubber, butyl rubber, ethylene-propylene rubber and thermoplastics elastomers.

These materials are part of JSR’s Petrochemical Products business unit, where overall sales volumes in the group’s fiscal first quarter (1 April – 30 June) increased only slightly from the prior-year period, the company has also reported.

Despite a “surge” in SSBR sales, a continued stagnation in domestic tire demand kept earnings relatively flat at the business unit, JSR said in a 25 July report on its first quarter business performance.

Net sales from the elastomers business for the first quarter came in at Yen40,528 million (€356 million), down 7.0 percent from the prior-year quarter. Elastomer sales volumes tonnes fell 2.7 percent to 155,451 tonnes.

First quarter operating income from elastomers increased by 7.2 percent to Yen903 million, lifting margins from 1.9 percent to 2.2 percent. The earnings figure,however, is still far behind the Yen2,223 million recorded in the first quarter of 2015.