Apparel / Textiles & Accessories

Everyone in the textile industry knows that the price of textile raw materials has gone crazy after the year, but it must be spandex that the price of all kinds of raw materials has increased the most. Taking 40D spandex as an example, the price was around 29,000 yuan/ton in September last year, but the price has risen to more than 60,000 yuan/ton in the past six months, more than doubled.

The sharp rise in the price of textile raw materials after the year was mainly driven by international crude oil and passive price adjustments due to rising costs. Support from the cost side has become an important factor in the price increase of raw materials, and spandex is no exception.

The upstream raw materials of spandex are mainly PTMEG and pure MDI, the ratio of the two is close to 8:2. In 2020, the upstream cost will increase significantly. The overall trend of the main raw material PTMEG is stable and upward, and the price of pure MDI has gradually returned to rationality after rising to a high point. However, the overall demand can be followed up. With the gradual entry of terminal demand, the supply gap is still obvious, and pure MDI also ushered in a sharp rise after the Spring Festival. With strong cost support, the price of spandex has gradually risen to a high level.

However, the cost-side support alone is not enough to make the price of spandex so crazy. The demand in the textile market is an important factor that really makes the price of spandex soar.

Spandex cannot be used alone to weave fabrics. The four-sided stretch is the spokesperson of spandex in the fabric market. Four-way stretches containing spandex are becoming more and more popular in the market this year. Almost all textile bosses said that stretch fabrics are the darling of the market. Not only that, stretch fabrics also became popular in the market during the epidemic last year.

However, although the market has entered the off-season recently, the speed of weaving companies' delivery of goods has slowed down, and the number of orders received by trading companies has gradually decreased, resulting in a slight weakness in the overall market. However, the stretch fabrics that have been hot since March, such as four-way stretch, high stretch, T400, T800 and other fabrics, are still hot recently, and the number of orders has decreased compared with the previous month, but there is no obvious downward trend. Dyeing factories still focus on stretch fabrics and become the main force in production.

With the change of consumer concepts and the upgrading of consumer demand, consumers have more and more demand for sports and leisure clothing, and their requirements for clothing functions are getting higher and higher. The four-sided elastic containing spandex is widely used in the clothing textile industry because of its excellent elasticity, acid and alkali resistance, sweat resistance, seawater resistance, and abrasion resistance. It can be used in all clothing that can be stretched to meet the comfort requirements, such as professional sportswear and swimming. For clothing and protective clothing, the general spandex content is 5-25%.

On the other hand, the price is cheap. Although the price of spandex has skyrocketed recently, the price of four-sided elastic is still relatively low compared to elastic varieties such as T400, T800, and SPH. Taking 100D four-sided stretch as an example, the price of relatively good-quality grey fabrics on the market is generally 2.8 yuan/m, and the price of some grey fabrics that only run volume regardless of quality can drop to 1.2 yuan/m, which is even not as good as the price of many polyester taffetas. expensive.

According to the trend of the market, in recent years, stretch fabrics will become the mainstream products in the market, and some old varieties of artificial silk fabrics without superior conditions will be eliminated by the market. It is precisely because of this that spandex, as a raw material for stretch fabrics, can be unscrupulous. According to statistics, the downstream spandex consumption will be around 720,000 tons in 2020, an increase of nearly 10% compared with 2019. In the case of the global economic damage caused by the epidemic, the demand for spandex is increasing. This year's global economic recovery will inevitably bring greater demand, which can be seen in the period after the year.

Another point is that the rate of increase in spandex production capacity is relatively slow. In 2020, domestic spandex production capacity will reach 890,000 tons, a year-on-year growth rate of 3.5%. The newly increased production capacity is mainly concentrated in large and medium-sized spandex manufacturers, and the industry concentration has continued to increase. Many backward and small production capacities have been shut down or are on the verge of shutting down. And the expansion of spandex production capacity has come to an end. New spandex production capacity will be limited in 2021. Under the influence of multiple factors, small and medium-sized enterprises in the industry have been unable to carry out large-scale production expansion. The newly added capacity in 2021 will be mainly Huafeng Chongqing's 40,000-ton differential spandex, which will be put into production in the second half of the year, of which 30,000 tons of Egret chemical fiber and 45,000 tons of Taihe New Materials are expected to be put into production by the end of 2021.

Domestic Spandex Production Plan for the Future:

And, judging from the current market situation, the future market is likely to be an asymmetrical trend of a price increase of 10,000 and a price decrease of 1,000. What's more difficult is that, not to mention the relatively small production capacity of spandex yarn as a textile raw material, it cannot be stored for a long time. This feature also limits the downstream stockpile to a certain extent, and is also one of the main factors for price increases.