Coatings World - February 2016

China

by Arnold Wang China Correspondent

China’s anticorrosion coatings mar- ket reached 4. 7 million tons in 2014, increased by 9. 3 percebt over 2013, and is the second largest coatings market segment, only behind architecture coatings. Anticorrosion coatings are mainly used by shipbuilding, transportation, infrastructure, oil and energy, and electromechanics industries. The anticorrosion coatings market, especially heavy-duty anticorrosion coatings market, is mainly represented by the products of foreign companies or their joint ventures, including Jotun, Kansai, Hempel, PPG and AkzoNobel, etc. and the domestic anticorrosion coatings producers include Shanghai Kailin, Jiangsu Lanling Paint and Beijing Zhisheng Weihua.

As a major downstream market for anti-corrosion coatings, the ship building industry of China has entered its winter season in the recent two years. Oversupply is the key problem, which caused several ship building companies such as Sainty Marine to declare bankruptcies in 2015, and it is estimated that more ship building companies, especially private ship builders who are difficult to win the contracts from government agencies and militaries, will not survive in 2016. And new ship orders will be more and more taken by a few state owned ship builders in China. Following this new trend, the concentration of anticorrosion coatings’ production capacity into several major players has been apparent in China recently. This phenomenon is verified by the capacity and sales volume increase of several foreign anticorrosion joint ventures, who are the major players in the Chinese market.