Earlier, Fairfield Market Research, a global market consulting firm, released a report stating that the global pigment market is still in a stable growth state. It is expected that the compound annual growth rate of the pigment market will be approximately 4.6% from 2021 to 2025. By the end of 2025, the global pigment market will be valued at $40 billion, mainly driven by the automotive, plastic, and construction industries.
Stable increase in market demand in the pigment industry
There are three future development trends
Pigments refer to substances that can impart color to objects and can be mainly divided into inorganic and organic pigments. Inorganic pigments mainly include natural minerals and inorganic compounds, while organic pigments refer to pigments made from organic compounds. The latter can also be further divided into classic organic pigments and high-performance organic pigments. The application fields of pigments are constantly expanding, not only used in traditional ink, coatings, and plastic industries, but also in various fields such as automobiles, construction, rail transit, cosmetics, and electronic chemistry applications. With the development of global 3D printing technology and degradable plastics, the global printing ink industry has rapidly expanded in recent years, further driving the demand for pigments in the market. According to data compiled by the China Dyestuff Industry Association and the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, China's pigment industry has developed rapidly and has become one of the most important pigment producing and consuming countries in the world. As early as 2018, China's dyeing and pigment industry achieved a cumulative sales revenue of 68.15 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.3%. While the industry is steadily growing, its future development trend is also gradually emerging.
1) The scale of advantageous enterprises continues to expand, and the industry concentration will further increase
At present, the concentration of China's pigment industry is relatively low, and there are many manufacturers; Moreover, there are significant technological differences and severe homogenization and disorderly competition among various manufacturers, which have compressed the profit level of the entire industry and affected the competitiveness of China's pigment products in the international market. With the guidance of national industrial policies and the tightening of environmental protection policies, large pigment manufacturing enterprises with financial and technological advantages will gradually gain greater market share, and the industry concentration will continue to increase.
2) Strict environmental and safety requirements, and the trend of upgrading environmentally friendly products and processes
In recent years, the environmental pressure on the pigment manufacturing industry and its downstream industries has been increasing, and a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises lacking environmental investment have shut down their production capacity or stopped production for rectification, directly affecting the production capacity of the pigment manufacturing industry. China advocates the development of a green economy and creates a green and environmentally friendly circular economy, which is the development direction of the future pigment industry. In the future, pigment enterprises will focus on developing environmentally friendly products and actively carry out green production through the research and implementation of environmentally friendly processes. Therefore, it is imperative for pigment manufacturing enterprises to upgrade their environmentally friendly products and processes.
3) The product structure is not entirely reasonable, and technological innovation needs to be strengthened
The pigment industry in China has significantly improved in terms of product performance, quality, stability, and craftsmanship, with pigment production and sales ranking among the top in the world. But the product structure is not entirely reasonable, most of which are conventional varieties with low added value, and low-end products are homogenized and have severe overcapacity. At the same time, there is a lack of high-performance pigment products to meet the market demand in new application fields. On the other hand, some pigment manufacturers have weak innovation capabilities and fail to fundamentally grasp the core technologies of organic pigment production, which will inevitably lead to overcapacity and low-end competition in the industry. Innovation and breakthroughs in production technology are important ways for small and medium-sized pigment manufacturers to change the current situation.
Accelerating the Promotion of Global Environmental Protection Policies
Domestic organic pigments have great potential
From the regulations of various countries on the environmental protection standards of coatings, it is a global consensus that environmental protection is becoming stricter. From the perspective of industrial development, organic pigments are bound to gradually replace other pigments. It is worth noting that market institutions believe that high-performance organic pigments not only have the characteristics of bright colors and strong coloring power, but also have better green safety, light resistance, and heat resistance. Although the global production of high-performance organic pigments accounts for 15-20% of the total production of all pigments, sales account for about 40-50% and grow at a rate of about 10% per year. With the implementation and further promotion of environmental protection policies at home and abroad, high-performance organic pigments are expected to gradually replace inorganic pigments, with huge potential for future development.