The flat glass market has entered a transition period from volume expansion to quality and function pursuit, from rapid growth to stable and slow growth. The market growth points are mainly reflected in the upgrading of traditional market demand structure and the continuous release of the potential of emerging markets such as electronics and solar energy. The release of "existing capacity" is the biggest uncertainty at present, and it will take a process to absorb the existing surplus capacity, said a person in charge of the China building glass and industrial glass association.
Experts predict that the second half of the year will continue the trend of the first half of the year, there will be no significant improvement in the glass market, nor will there be major fluctuations, the annual industry benefits will remain low level of profitability.
Peak season up strength is not large
This year the market overall trend of warming, the current peak season trend continues, but the strength of the rise is not large. Affected by the negative factors such as the concentrated release of production capacity, futures market prices fell sharply and market confidence also fell slightly. Experts predict that September will be the golden season for glass consumption demand, but the factors of both positive and negative are interwoven, both driving the increase of market demand and negative in the mind of concentrated production capacity. The overall rise of the market will be replaced by regional differentiation, and some regional price fluctuations will occur. Major regions will be dominated by small increases.
The second quarter is also a seasonal sales season for glass, with a slight increase in price. The production lines that were discontinued in the early stage were successively ignited, and the production capacity increased, but the demand did not change much, resulting in an increase in the overall inventory of flat glass. Due to the pressure of production capacity, the glass market this year did not see obvious recovery and strong momentum of recovery, only the seasonal recovery. According to data from key monitoring enterprises, the total inventory of flat glass in June was 45.93 million weight cases, an increase of 9.31 million weight cases compared with the beginning of the year. According to the statistics of China building glass and industrial glass association, the production capacity of plate glass has increased more than expected, including 14 new ignition production lines for plate glass in the first half of the year, 6 reproducing ignition production lines, 7 water-cooling repair and shutdown production lines, 13 production lines with a net increase of 65.1 million weight boxes. In the first half of the year, China's total output of plate glass was 38.987 million cases by weight, up 10.8 percent year-on-year and down 10.2 percent year-on-year. The national key monitoring float glass enterprises have produced 283.56 million cases of float glass, an increase of 12.5% over the same period last year. They have sold 268.3 million cases of float glass, with a production and sales rate of 94.62%, an increase of 2.6 percentage points over the same period last year.
Experts predict that the glass industry's serious "overcapacity" trend is difficult to change in the short term. The development mode of the industry has not been effectively changed. In general, the development of the industry is still in the extensive development mode of increasing investment and expanding scale, and the development path is narrow. For many years, the flat glass project has been under the "record keeping system". In order to develop the local economy and attract investment, some local government departments in charge have failed to fully and effectively implement the spirit of "document", and the momentum of blind development has not been effectively curbed. At the same time, some enterprises' over-expectation of market demand and over-evaluation of their own competitiveness also lead to blind development.
Downstream market 'fine tuning in place'
Although the profit level of flat glass this year can be regarded as a small profit, it is much better than the loss of the whole industry last year. In the first half of the year, the profit of the flat panel industry was 1.3 billion yuan. Although it is still at a low level, it has improved compared with -570 million yuan in the same period of last year. The profit of technical glass was 1.91 billion yuan, compared with 1.38 billion yuan in the same period of last year.
The downstream market of glass industry this year -- construction industry, automobile industry and export industry provide support for the improvement of the situation of the industry. Experts predict that the overall performance of the downstream market in the future will also be "in-situ fine-tuning", there will be no significant increase in demand.
On the one hand, the real estate market is affected by the regulation and control policies; on the other hand, the real estate market is also driven by the urbanization policies. The market confidence is mixed. In the second half of the year, the real estate market will open up, but it will not grow rapidly.
In the automobile industry, the output of automobiles exceeded 10 million in the first half of this year, with the year-on-year growth of production and sales maintained at more than 12%. The demand for glass is in a steady growth trend. Experts predict that in the second half of the year, the growth rate of the auto industry will slow to about 10%, so the growth rate of major automobile glass manufacturers will slow down. But the automobile glass concentration is high, for the entire glass industry, does not have too big influence.
In recent years, the export volume of glass has been decreasing year by year. In the first half of 2013, the glass export market continued to show a sluggish state. According to statistics, from January to June, China's plate glass exports totaled 9772 thousand tons, down 0.5% year on year, the amount of 348.42 million us dollars, an increase of 10.5%. Among them, the accumulative export of float glass was 783,300 tons, down 3.4%, with the amount of usd 25,182 million, down 0.5%. At present, the international market is weak, is expected to continue in the second half of the first half of the trend.
In the future, the development of strategic emerging industries and deep glass processing industry will bring rare opportunities to the glass industry. China's enterprises in the number and depth of secondary processing are large gap, glass deep processing rate is only 40%, and the world average level of about 55%, developed countries up to 65%~85%. Glass processing enterprise profit situation is generally good in making low-end products manufacturers, after processing in our country increment rate was only about 2.5 times that of as-received is 5 times of developed countries, some electronic glass, automotive glass, high-grade architectural glass and other still need to import, in terms of foreign trade, mainly primary products export situation remains to be improved.