How we study converters

One of the features of many our Reports is that we have done our best to focus on converters. We have studied traders’ sales and tried to lay special emphasis on end converters of polymers. For that we used more than a dozen different sources of information, including detailed statistics of financial figures and inland transportation in Russia. By individual converters we tried to analyze business by groups they are included into. Apart from sales and production figures, we collected data on increase in production capacities by each large converter (starting from January 1, 2000). We are perfectly aware that our findings are in the upshot a subjective opinion of MRC’s analysts. In case we were not able to determine capacities by direct methods, we presented all indirect data on that converter to enable you to estimate output capacities on your own.

We did our utmost to study business of each large converter by six key indicators:

• output in the current year
• export in the current year
• inland railway transportation in the current year
• investments over the period from 2000
• polymer imports over the period from 2000
• current polymer processing capacities

If you would like to see a more detailed description of converters’ activities in TOP-50 ratings in each sector, please, see rating reviews. To get detailed data on a market of either one or another type of finished goods, please, see our Annual Reports.

We tried to identify each brand of purchased equipment, its rated capacity, as well depending on the type of a converter we determined overall rated capacity of processing of a certain polymer on that equipment. The most complicated task was to convert capacity of, for example, a blowing machine or a molding machine into natural units (kg/h). For that, we applied our own ratios for each type of equipment for each technology.