The demand for surfactants is high and the direction of refinement is developing in the future

Surfactants are a class of active materials that can significantly change all surface/interface properties, and are widely used in all walks of life in the development of the national economy. The downstream is mainly to water treatment, glass fiber, paint, construction, paint, daily chemical, ink, electronics, pesticides, textiles, printing and dyeing and other industrial product production industries. In the global market, household detergents are the largest application market for surfactants, accounting for about 40% of the total consumption area. This was followed by personal care applications, which accounted for 15% of total global consumption.

In the world, there are more kinds of surfactants, about 6,000 kinds, but affected by market demand, the products produced by surfactant manufacturers in China are more concentrated, mainly in fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether sulfate, olefin sulfonate, alkyl benzene sulfonate and other carboxylic acid products. On the demand side, with the rapid development of the downstream field, the domestic surfactant market demand continues to grow, and the total sales volume of domestic surfactant products in 2019 totaled 2.3 million tons. In terms of imports and exports, China's imports and exports of surfactants maintained a certain growth in 2019, with imports reaching 1.3 million tons and exports reaching 2.25 million tons.

In order to ensure the quality of products and improve their competitiveness, surfactant downstream enterprises are more inclined to choose suppliers with large scale, good reputation and high product quality, so China's surfactant market concentration continues to increase. At present, enterprises in the domestic market are mainly divided into two categories. The first category is mainly for overseas fine chemical giants, such as Dow Chemical, BASF, British Heda, which has a wide range of products and strong research and development capabilities; The second category is the domestic special surfactant manufacturers, the product types are relatively small, mainly focused on one of the fields, such as Zhongshan Chemical, Weir Chemical, Cologne refining, Oke shares and other enterprises.

From the perspective of development direction, with the upgrading of China's industry, the downstream field of surfactants has gradually developed to the high-end, and the fine differentiation, specialization and refinement of surfactant products need to be improved. In the future, domestic surfactant enterprises need to divide the efficacy of product performance and its application field, strengthen the structure-activity relationship research, so as to carry out molecular design and research and development on the process route, and realize the diversified and high-end development of surfactant products.

The downstream application field of surfactants is relatively broad, and the market demand continues to rise, driven by the field of household detergents. From the development point of view, China's surfactant products are relatively simple, lack of variety, and can not be refined in terms of product quality, so the domestic high-end market is occupied by foreign enterprises, and the future local enterprises have a larger replacement space.