Resin Price Report: The Ups and Downs of 2024Resin Price Report: The Ups and Downs of 2024
Reflections on a solid year for the resin market from the PlasticsExchange.
January 13, 2025

As one might expect, activity at the PlasticsExchange trading desk was muted as the year came to a close. In its Market Update for the holiday-shortened week of Dec. 30, the resin clearinghouse looked back on the year. Here are some of the observations.
The traditional upstream inventory supply purge began and ended early this year. The heightened sales efforts, which were highly focused on exports, began in October and the vast majority of deeply discounted offers, both polyethylene (PE) and to a lesser extent polypropylene (PP), were concluded by Thanksgiving.
Several good groups of Prime material sold off into the export market during early December, but producers sought to close their order books early, so very few new special offers were seen during the second half of the month. While spot resin prices were pressured during the sell off, the market began to recover during the second half of December because of a lack of fresh offers and in anticipation of higher prices in the new year.
Looking back, the resin market showed solid performance in 2024. The heavy hurricane forecast proved correct, though there was limited impact on plastics production areas, writes the PlasticsExchange. Still, the threat of a heavy hurricane season drove pre-buying of PE and PP as an inventory buffer, and the strong demand drove price increases in the second and third quarters. Substantial destocking occurred in Q4 and brought slack demand, negatively impacting prices.
Challenges: Conflicts and drought
The resin market faced several other challenges in 2024:
Heightened warfare in the Middle East and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict strained global supply chains;
Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the Panama Canal drought caused shipping bottlenecks;
Demand from Europe and Asia was weaker than expected;
a brief three-day strike by the International Longshoremen Association accelerated logistics issues and volatile freight costs.
The vessel delays constrained export shipments, backing up export supply in the United States, which contributed to overstuffed Houston-area warehouses, writes the PlasticsExchange. Vessels even skipped stops in Houston and other major US ports, prioritizing quick returns to Asia because of President-elect Trump’s tariff threats. These issues came to a head near the end of the year, when Gulf Coast warehouses became filled to the gills, causing additional packaging delays and eventual embargoes on shipments to some packaging facilities.
Producers seek to implement PE contract price hikes
Prime PE prices at the PlasticsExchange bottomed out in mid-December, and with upstream selling pressures removed, levels began to creep higher. The lack of offers left buyers seeking material for weeks, which played into producers’ plans to turn the market higher and implement some or all of their $0.05 to 0.07/lb price increase on to January contracts.
Most PE grades added $0.005/lb during each of the final two weeks of the year and picked up yet another half-cent as the calendar flipped to 2025. LDPE Film was the exception, which has climbed $0.025/lb since hitting its December low. PE saw a few small price cycles during 2024, but overall price volatility was reduced considerably from the wild swings seen over the previous several years.
Q4 sell off wipes away gains
The market rallied during the first quarter, earning average gains of $0.03/lb, and spot levels bounced around within a small range over the next few months, supported by swift exports raising the floor for incremental sales. PE prices topped out in the summer, with total gains averaging about a nickel, supported by buyers stocking up as a buffer against potential weather-related disruptions. When storms mostly missed the Houston/Louisiana coast and production proved resilient, domestic demand softened. This led into the Q4 sell off, which wiped away the year’s earlier gains — some grades bled red for the year — while low-density PE held on to small increases. When the dust settled, PE grades on average shed nearly a cent for the year. Major indices did not necessarily move lock-step with each other during 2024 and averaged out a $0.04/lb or so gain for the year, reports the PlasticsExchange.
PP trading was limited the final days of the year, but perked back up as January began and processors needed quick truckloads to process. A good number of railcars changed hands across the PlasticsExchange’s spot trading platform, too. While off-grade railcars continued to flow through the end of the year, by mid-month PP producers had essentially stopped selling Prime, as they looked ahead to January where prices started to point higher. Spot polymer-grade propylene (PGP) prices then began to firm and spot PP prices followed suit. By the end of the month, spot PP levels advanced $0.025/lb from their December low and netted a $0.015/lb monthly gain. However, PP contracts still recorded a loss in December as they followed PGP contracts down $0.025/lb, though they are now poised to at least reverse the loss in January.
PP experienced several disruptions during 2024, including four force majeure declarations, two near-miss weather events in Texas, and one delayed capacity addition. The PP market saw several pricing cycles during the year, mostly following the sharp rallies and breaks experienced in upstream PGP monomer, which were usually driven by propane dehydrogenation (PDH) outages. PP resin and PGP monomer remained well-correlated, though there were periods of margin contraction and expansion and when the dust settled, our spot PP prices dropped a net $0.055/lb, while PGP contracts lost $0.075/lb.
Read the complete Market Update, which includes insights on ethylene and propylene pricing as well as trends in the energy markets, on the PlasticsExchange website.
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