LG Chem Maintenance and Mitsui Price Hike: POE Prices Rise?

Recently, LG Chem announced that its 100,000-ton/year POE plant in Yeosu, South Korea, will undergo a 48-day shutdown for maintenance from October 15 to December 1, 2025. This plan overlaps significantly with the maintenance period of another overseas supplier, SSNC (Korea), whose 230,000-ton/year plant will also be under maintenance from mid-October to the end of November, creating a situation of concentrated contraction in the global POE supply. Concurrently, Mitsui Chemicals announced a price increase of $200 per ton for POE, effective from September 1, 2025.

The maintenance by LG Chem and the price increase by Mitsui Chemicals may seem contradictory, but they actually reflect the common strategic choice of overseas manufacturers when facing the rise of Chinese domestic POE.

Mitsui Chemicals' price increase is a direct response to rising costs (upstream alpha-olefins, energy prices) and global supply tightness (consecutive maintenance by LG, Dow, SSNC). Its core objective is to strive to maintain or even improve the profitability per ton of products in the context of an expected decline in shipment volumes (affected by demand substitution in the Chinese market), thereby safeguarding the profit levels of its global business.

In addition, LG's maintenance cycle highly overlaps with SSNC, creating a "vacuum period" in the short-term supply for the Asia-Pacific region. This is not only a rigid demand for equipment maintenance but also a wise move to proactively optimize global capacity allocation and avoid engaging in a "price war" with low-cost domestic materials in the Chinese market. They are shifting more resources towards high-end applications and other regional markets with higher profit margins. The shared goal of both parties is that, under the impact of the domestic Chinese manufacturing wave, overseas manufacturers are actively transitioning from a strategy of "winning by volume" to one of "compensating volume with price" and "high-end differentiation," attempting to safeguard their profit margins.