Investor Update 2021 - BASF's new Verbund site in Zhanjiang
Investor Update 2021
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BASF's new Verbund site in Zhanjiang - Transcript Q&A September 27, 2021
For the year 2021, the capex for our Verbund site in Zhanjiang is still somewhat limited
because we are going into the final approval of the project in the first half of 2022.
Martin Brudermüller: A rough number for the 2021 capex is €300 million.
Jaideep Pandya (On Field Investment Research): Why do you have to produce
HDPE? Does this mean this site is fundamentally long ethylene and the 500 kt HDPE
is a plug to balance upstream ethylene versus its downstream requirements?
Markus Kamieth: We are not a producer of polyethylene anywhere in the world. When
we got into the Verbund planning of our Zhanjiang Verbund site, it was clear that the
major source of competitiveness of our downstream value chains is a mixed feed
world-scale steam cracker. This is an order of magnitude of roughly 1 million tons of
ethylene and the according share of propylene and higher fractions. This means that
you will have downstream consumption of this appropriate amount of ethylene. To feed
our strategic value chains, we need a certain share. Then we had to make a decision
of how to utilize the scale, so to say, that the steam cracker provides. We analysed this
in detail, and we came up with the solution to consume the appropriate amount of
ethylene, then to convert it into the so-called high-density polyethylene because here
the market dynamics as well as the market segments that this product goes into are
most attractive to us. They are most suitable to overall provide a competitive setup of
the Verbund. That was the decision. It is to some degree a decision that was driven by
the economics and the scale that you need for a world-scale steam cracker. However,
in the overall context of the C2 value chain, this provides us also with a good profitability
mix throughout the products that are more in our strategic pathway, as well as in a very
competitive HDPE setup that we will have in South China.
Martin Brudermüller: I think, in all fairness, we can also say: We have theoretically
looked into many, many concepts at the very beginning, also other concepts: without
a steam cracker, propane dehydrogenation and all the other things. So, the overall
product portfolio of BASF with the mix, even with the caveat to produce high-density
polyethylene here, had by far the best economics.
Markus Kamieth: And in BASF-YPC, so in Nanjing, there is also a polyethylene
production as part of the Verbund setup and also here a significant contributor to
profitability in that Verbund setup that we are already operating.
Andreas Heine (Stifel): How does the new Verbund site in Zhanjiang change the
group sales split and the share of BASF's local production in China and what was the
capital return of BASF-YPC Verbund site compared to BASF's other Verbund sites?
Any comments on the share of maintenance of the non-core growth projects of BASF,
in other words: What will be invested for growth, excluding the new Verbund site and
Battery Materials?
Markus Kamieth: If you look at the overall sales development of BASF in Greater
China - now I exclude the BYC sales again - over the last ten years, we have had a
sales growth of roughly 7% per year.
If you assume such a growth going forward, our Zhanjiang Verbund site will add quite
a significant share of the growth of the next decade to our business in Greater China,
but it will not be the majority. So, there is a lot of growth that will also come from other
divisions; it will come from battery materials, but it will also come from quite a number
of not Zhanjiang-related business growth activities.
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