The story of rising and falling tides of prosperity has played out over the past three years, with the glove industry among the protagonists.
After creating a historical peak in 2021, the glove companies’ days in 2022 entered a downward spiral of greater supply than demand and excess capacity. Among them, the domestic glove “three giants” – Inco Medical, Lanfan Medical, in the red medical performance is a direct turn from the surge into a plunge.
Currently, with the slow easing of the imbalance between supply and demand, glove companies are also gradually calming down from the anxiety of “selling without shipping”. Looking to the future, how to gradually fade in a phase of protection, but still promote the glove products to achieve commercial value has become a new proposition for enterprises. Compared with the international level of use, the domestic glove merchants may be able to do a lot of things.
It is important to note that while the days of extreme prosperity are gone, changes have also emerged. Currently, glove products are at a turning point in terms of volume, price, supply and demand.
There is no denying that the prices of glove products have gone through a wild ride up and down over the past three years. In this process, the hoarding of intermediaries has been an important factor in exacerbating price fluctuations. In other words, there is a general “buy up, not buy down” mentality among dealers. In other words, when prices are rising, dealers will actively stock up until prices peak and then start to clear their inventory, thus making the product available at the highest price stage to maximise profits.
Compared to the third and fourth quarters of last year, the first quarter of this year has seen dealers in the glove industry move towards the end of the de-stocking process. In other words, the goods previously hoarded are being cleared, which equates to the huge factors that once influenced the volume and price changes in the glove industry currently having a diminishing influence. The reason for this speculation is that the “end of stocking” is due to the fact that the spot market price of nitrile latex, the raw material for nitrile gloves, is “slowly picking up”.
According to the “Nitrile Glove Market Development Outlook” published by Lonzhong Information, the spot market price of nitrile latex was close to RMB 6,500 per tonne in February, a significant upturn. Previously, since June last year, the spot price for this category had exceeded RMB7,000 per tonne, before falling all the way until it fell below RMB6,000 per tonne in January this year, which can be interpreted as a very poor sales situation. Of course, the price of this raw material is also affected by fluctuations in the price of crude oil.
Behind this change in the price of this key raw material is also a reflection of the potential growth in demand for glove products. For the large glove producers, it also means that their orders may be slowly increasing.
If there are any needs of medical gloves, please feel free to contact us
hongguanmedical@outlook.com
Post time: Jul-06-2023