China’s glyphosate technical is mainly for export and for domestic formulation production, with the former taking a larger share. With the capacity expansion, overseas market has been getting more and more important to China’s glyphosate industry, and the domestic consumption is also increasing rapidly.
With the growth in GM crops planting area and the development of bio-energy industry, the global demand for glyphosate had increased rapidly at a CAGR of about 10.9% in 2007-2011. With the largest planting area of GM crops, South America has the largest glyphosate consumption, sharing about 34.2% of the global use in 2011.
As the fourth largest consumer of glyphosate, following the US, Brazil and Argentina, China represents about 6.5% of the global glyphosate market in 2011, with its consumption growing at a CAGR of 13.0% in 2007-2011.
In China, glyphosate is quite important for weed control in orchard, wasteland reclamation and traditional crop fields in the period of pre-seeding. Orchard is the largest application of glyphosate, accounting for about 34.5% of the country’s total in 2011. Despite that 10% SL should be eliminated in domestic market at the beginning of 2012, it is still the most popular glyphosate formulation at home in 2011 due to its lowest price among various glyphosate formulations, accounting for 59.6% of the total glyphosate formulation use. However, its market share has decreased a lot compared with 84.4% in 2007, and the left market share has mainly seized by 30% SL, whose market share increased from 11.3% in 2007 to 31.4% in 2011. The top five provinces by glyphosate consumption (AI) are Guangdong Province, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Yunnan Province, Henan Province and Hebei Province, with their total consumption accounting for about 33.2% of the country’s total in 2011.
