Nylon industry trend: What are the four leading companies doing?
Jul 16, 2019 ｜ by CT
In addition to low temperature resistance, nylon has outstanding characteristics in strength, wear resistance and moisture absorption, which makes nylon fabrics have great advantages in outdoor, sports, cold-proof, casual wear and other fields. At present, nylon has become the second largest chemical fiber after polyester in the textile field, accounting for 7.36% of the world’s total chemical fiber output.
So, what is the market situation of China’s nylon industry since 2018? What is the current competition pattern? What are the new actions of leading enterprises in the industry? Reporters recently sorted out the operating conditions of Huading Nylon, Meida Nylon, Eversun Holdings Group, Highsun Group’s four nylon enterprises or enterprises with nylon as the main industry in 2018.
Targeting differentiation and actively expanding the application market
In 2018, the operation quality of China’s nylon industry has been further improved: the industry’s production capacity continues to grow, raw material supply capacity has increased, and the integrity of the industrial chain has continued to increase.
According to the data from the nylon branch of China Chemical Fiber Association, in 2018, China’s nylon industry realized a profit of 4.207 billion yuan, an increase of 1.65% over the previous year, accounting for 10.68% of the total profits of the whole industry; nylon production continued to grow, with the annual output of 3.3037 million tons, an increase of 5.28% over the previous year.
In terms of market operation, in 2018, the price of nylon POY has a high correlation with raw material price, the downstream demand continues to improve, and the supply of nylon POY industry shows a tight trend, which makes the price transmission of raw materials smoother and the industry’s profit performance better. Although the price of nylon fell sharply in the fourth quarter, it is more caused by the price decline of crude oil and other commodities, and the profitable space of the industry is also dominated by oscillations. The overall profitability level is still acceptable.
It is unavoidable that there is a trend of differentiation in the competition pattern of nylon industry. In 2018, the percentage of loss-making enterprises was 19.12%, and the loss of loss-making enterprises was 406 million yuan, an increase of 30.89% over the same period of last year, accounting for 10.37% of the total loss of the whole industry.
In the fierce market competition, enterprises that can maintain their advantages and keep pace with the times can occupy a place and achieve ideal business performance. Huading Nylon and Meida Nylon are the representatives.
According to the annual reports of 2018 disclosed by two listed companies, Huading Nylon achieved a cumulative revenue of 6.603 billion yuan in 2018, an increase of 132.97% over 2017, and a net profit of 279 million yuan, an increase of 165.27% over 2017. In 2018, Meida Nylon realized sales revenue of 3.813 billion yuan, an increase of 7.15% over the previous year, and realized net profit of 7.2909 million yuan belonging to shareholders of listed companies, an increase of 6.54% over the previous year.
Huading Nylon and Meida Nylon both said that adjusting and optimizing product structure, reducing inventory and reducing costs were the main reasons for maintaining the company’s performance growth. Especially, promoting the differentiation strategy is the magic weapon for the two enterprises to maintain their advantages in the competition. In 2018, while increasing the market share of existing products, Huading Nylon has been expanding its emerging markets, with a wider range of products sold. Meida Nylon is demand-oriented and invests more in product variety development, quality improvement and brand building.
Machine replacement and intelligent production
Cost reduction and efficiency enhancement is also an unavoidable topic for enterprises, and intelligent manufacturing is obviously one of the most effective ways to solve this problem.
Jingfeng Technology Co., Ltd., which belongs to Fujian Eversun Holdings Group, is a model factory of Intelligent Manufacturing in Fujian Province. It is understood that this is the first domestic nylon industry in line with the industrial 4.0 standard of intelligent automation production line, fully completed will become the world’s most advanced intelligent nylon production line.
Huading Nylon also firmly grasps the industry’s “intelligent manufacturing” and promotes the construction of refined production and data integration remote control management. The “Full Process Nylon Production Smart Factory” project, which was approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, was launched in the second half of 2018. After the project is officially put into production, the production efficiency can be increased by 50%.
According to industry analysts, in addition to improving production efficiency, intelligent manufacturing has unparalleled advantages in energy saving, intensive production, meeting customer’s individual needs, improving product quality, and shortening order cycle. Therefore, intelligent manufacturing has become an industry trend, which is conducive to enhancing the overall competitiveness of enterprises and helping enterprises to develop to a new level.
Open up the industrial chain and focus on building an integrated structure
In order to break through the bottleneck of raw materials and further enhance the competitive advantage, the leading enterprises in the nylon industry actively opened up the industrial chain and built an integrated development pattern.
In 2018, Highsun Group’s acquisition of Fordbong became a hot spot in the industry. Through this transaction, it has become the largest caprolactam production group in the world. Huading Nylon are unwilling to lag behind. In July 2018, Sanding Group, the controlling shareholder of Huading Group, jointly signed the Investment Contract of Caprolactam-Polymerization-Spinning Integration Project with Pingdingshan City and Pingmei Shenma Group, to help Huading Nylon extend actively upstream to reduce the production cost of nylon spinning.
“Upstream caprolactam supply is constrained by others, which is the main reason for the relatively slow development of China’s nylon industry. With the leading enterprises of Highsun Group and Eversun Holdings Group actively opening up the upstream industrial chain, the cost of caprolactam has been greatly reduced, and the profitability of China’s nylon industry will gradually increase. An industry analyst said. “It is worth mentioning that with the acceleration of the integration process, the large-scale and intensive development of nylon industry has become a trend. In this context, nylon industry needs to seize the opportunity, on the basis of large-scale development, continuously improve the level of production automation, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and promote the transformation and upgrading of the industry.
