Polyphenylene sulfide (PPS), is a special engineering plastic with excellent comprehensive properties. PPS is characterized by excellent high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, radiation resistance, flame resistance, balanced physical and mechanical properties, and excellent dimensional stability which can be used as structural polymer materials and as special engineering plastics after modification.
Besides, PPS can also be made into various functional films, coatings and composite materials, and has been successfully applied in electronics, environmental protection, petrochemical, aerospace, and automotive industries.
As the downstream industries are developing rapidly in the recent years, the global demand for PPS is also rising continuously from 2011 to 2017 with the average annual growth rate of 10.26%. In 2017, the global PPS demand is about 115,000 MT while the PPS output is about 117,000 MT.
The global PPS industry is highly concentrated. The world's leading PPS suppliers are mainly from the United States, Japan and China, among which Japan is the largest producer of PPS, accounting for about 45% of the world's total production capacity. The top five PPS manufacturers are Toray, DIC, Solway, NHU and Fortron, accounting for over 50% of global PPS production capacity.
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China is also the largest PPS consumer in Asia with the market demand of PPS rising from 13,000 MT in 2010 to 47,000 MT in 2017. As the electronic, environmental protection and automotive industries develop rapidly in China, the PPS production and demand have become increasingly tight and there will be a severe competition between the foreign and domestic PPS suppliers.
However, as a special engineering plastics, PPS has high technical barriers with high price. The modified PPS yield is much lower than other engineering plastics and general plastics. In addition, there is still a big gap between the quality of domestic and imported modified PPS due to the unstable formula of domestic modified PPS, and the unstable quality of domestic resin products.