Sweeteners China News

Welcome to the December issue of Sweeteners China News published by CCM, a professional consulting company which has been extensively and intensively focusing on the dynamics of China's sweetener industry.

2013 was a difficult time for domestic sucrose industry, the same as for domestic sweetener industry. Because of the oversupply in domestic sucrose industry, sucrose price in China witnessed a continuous decrease in 2013. As sucrose has been alternative to starch sugars, low sucrose price in China in 2013 had the most serious impact on domestic starch sugar industry. For example, rather than the uptrend of corn prices and slowdown of demand from downstream fields which exerted great influence on China's HFCS in 2012, the decrease of sucrose price seemed to be a more decisive factor for the declines in 2013. By the way, low sucrose price also brought negative effect on the sales of some other sweetener products in 2013.

Based on this, not only starch sugar producers, but also other sweetener producers in China had made some changes in 2013, in order to improve their competitiveness and reverse their poor performance. For instance, domestic starch sugar producers shifted their sales focus on starch sugar export in 2013, which was largely attributed to the poor performance of domestic starch sugar market in 2013. Meanwhile, Shandong Fustaste released an announcement in Dec. 2013, showing that it became the first GMP (2010 edition)-certified xylitol producer in China, which will help improve its competitiveness in the domestic xylitol API market.

New year, new beginning. However, for some domestic sweetener producers in China like Guangdong L&P, 2014 continues to be a year full of challenges. Though the construction of the first phase of Guangdong L&P's sucralose project, which has a production capacity of 300t/a, was completed in Dec. 2013, the company will find it difficult to make full use of its expanded capacity in 2014, due to its tiny market share in China's sucralose export.

To be noticed, the RMB/USD exchange rate is 6.13 in this issue (source: The People's Bank of China), and all the prices mentioned in this newsletter include the VAT unless otherwise specified. If there are any specific topics you would like us to cover or any subjects you would like us to investigate in more details, please contact us by +86-20-3761 6606, or econtact@cnchemicals.com.