From 2019 to 2023, the average annual growth rate of PVC production capacity was 1.95%, and the production capacity increased from 25.08 million tons in 2019 to 27.92 million tons in 2023. Before 2021, the import dependence has always been around 4%, mainly due to the low price of foreign sources and the difficulty of replacing some high-end products.

During the three years of 2021-2023, PVC production capacity increased, while imports also increased rapidly, because some foreign devices were affected by force majeure, the supply was affected, and the price had no obvious competitive advantage, and the import dependence dropped to less than 2%. At the same time, since 2021, China’s PVC export market has expanded rapidly, and under the price advantage, it has been favored by India, Southeast Asia and other countries, and the PVC export situation has an increasing impact on the domestic market. The rapidly increasing capacity of ethylene material accounts for a large proportion, thus intensifying the competition between calcium carbide and ethylene process products. From the perspective of regional distribution of new production capacity, the new production capacity in 2023 is mainly concentrated in Shandong and South China.

2023 annual production capacity according to the process differentiation, mainly concentrated in calcium carbide enterprises, accounting for 75.13% of the national production capacity, because China is a country with more coal and less oil, and coal is mainly distributed in the northwest region, the northwest relies on rich coal, calcium carbide resources, and enterprises are mostly integrated supporting facilities, so the PVC production capacity in the northwest region is relatively large. North China, East China, South China in recent years, the new capacity is mainly ethylene production capacity, due to the coastal, convenient transportation, raw material import and transportation.

From a regional perspective, the northwest region still ranks first with 13.78 million tons of production capacity. According to regional changes, South China added 800,000 tons to supplement the local demand gap, on this basis, the transfer of resources in North China to South China’s market share narrowed, North China only added a set of 400,000 tons of equipment, and other regions have no new capacity. Overall, in 2023, only South China, North China and Northwest China’s production capacity will increase, especially in South China, where the increase in production capacity has a greater impact. The new capacity in 2024 will mainly be in East China.

2019-2023, China’s PVC industry capacity continued to expand, driven by annual increase in production in recent years, domestic PVC production capacity has continued to expand, 2019-2023 five years of capacity expansion of 2.84 million tons.

Due to changes in China’s centralized capacity expansion and overseas supply and demand patterns, sea freight and other factors and indicators, China’s imports have declined continuously, and the import dependence is expected to drop to 1.74% in 2023. In the long run, with the increase of domestic supply, product quality optimization, the future domestic supply gap is bound to gradually shrink.