JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #81 - May/June 2013 - 22

Market

carbon

Carbon fibre: a quieter year
in terms of announcements
- Carbon fibre:
a quieter year in terms
of announcements ..... p22
- Boeing and BMW Group
to collaborate on carbon
fibre recycling ............ p26

Here, our annual survey reviews the “keys” to a market in which
the players have not manifested themselves much this year.
Japanese companies try to keep their footprint in a sector where
the number of players is growing.

- Sales manager:
keeping customer
in mind ........................ p27

apacity forecasts are fairly close
to those in our last carbon fibre
study. There was such a wave of
announcements during the previous period that it is not surprising that things
have calmed down. Let’s not forget that
it takes a lot of financial capital to produce carbon fibre. Both the European
and American economies have been
sluggish recently, which tends to slow
down production of raw materials.

Offer and production capacities
Nominal production capacity worldwide for small-tow PAN-based carbon
fibre (i.e. with 24,000 or fewer filaments, called 24K fibre) is expected to
rise from 94,150 metric tons in 2013
to 111,100 MT in 2015. Now, it is not
possible for production units to have
100% productivity with respect to their
nominal capacity. (According to some
manufacturers, some production lines
can achieve an output coefficient of
0.9.) So, with an output coefficient of
0.7 – given the settings for machines
and for changing/loading the spools
of PAN to produce the different grades
of fibre – production forecasts should

22 jec composites magazine / No81 May - June 2013

rise from 65,900 MT in 2013 to 77,770
MT in 2015, or a 18% increase (see
Table 1). The market share of Japanese
companies will drop a bit from 2013 to
2015 (Figure 1).
Their “footprint” will shrink from 54%
of production capacity in 2012 to 46%
in 2015, in an expanding market (by
57,7%) where there are increasing numbers of players. However, this smaller
market share must be put into perspective: these companies have the knowhow to produce much faster on a new
line than the latecomers; they continue
to invest; and their target remains highperformance fibres.
Nominal production capacity worldwide for large-tow PAN-based fibre
(i.e. with more than 24K filaments) is
expected to rise from 32,700 MT in
2013 to 43,200 tonnes in 2015. With an
output coefficient of 0.9 (in this case,
the production lines tend to be singleproduct lines), production forecasts
should rise from 29,430 MT in 2013 to
38,880 MT in 2015, or a 32% increase
(see Table 2).
So the nominal production capacity
worldwide for PAN-based fibre (small
and large tow) should rise from 126,850
MT in 2013 to 154,300 MT in 2015
(see Table 3), and production forecasts,
from 95,330 MT in 2013 to 116,650

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JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #81 - May/June 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #81 - May/June 2013