Sweeteners China News

Welcome to the May issue of Sweeteners China News (Vol. 4 Issue 5 2014) published by CCM, a professional consulting company which has been extensively and intensively focusing on the dynamics of China's sweetener industry.

China's sucrose industry was in a doldrum by May 2014. Because of the low market price of sucrose, domestic manufacturers are reluctant to sell sucrose at present, leading to a poor sales performance in the whole industry. However, it's predicted that domestic sucrose manufacturers will benefit from several favorable factors in future, including lower estimations for sucrose outputs of both China and global market in the extraction season of 2014/2015.

Export performance is rather important for domestic producers of high intensity sweeteners, such as sucralose, aspartame, and other export-oriented sweeteners. Intense competition among domestic manufacturers directly resulted in the manufacturers adopting a price reduction strategy to sales promotion. The average export prices of most high intensity sweeteners had kept YoY declining in the first quarter of 2014, while the corresponding export volumes showed different trends. Both of sucralose and aspartame witnessed a year-on-year  growth in export volume, however, the market share of leading sucralose manufacturers increased while that of aspartame ones decreased in Q1 2014. In fact, low profit margin made some leading enterprises like Changzhou Niutang reduce the aspartame proportion in the whole business, while other high intensity sweeteners, such as stevia sweetener also brought great pressure on aspartame in recent years. EFSA had carried out a revised exposure assessment of stevia sweetener, and it would be likely to authorize the the extension of uses for stevia sweetener for several hot drinks. Stevia sweeteners is continuing the extension of its downstream market. By contrast, cyclamate is facing a bleak future in overseas market. Both the export volume and price of China's cyclamate decreased year-on-year in Q1 2014.

To be noticed, the RMB/USD exchange rate in this issue is is 6.158 (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.