What is the development prospect of the fiberglass industry?
Fiberglass is an excellent functional and structural material. Its excellent product performance and functional designability determine its wide downstream applications and its application areas are constantly expanding and extending, which promotes the long-term growth of demand in the fiberglass industry. China is currently the largest fiberglass producer and the largest market for demand and application of the global fiberglass industry.
In the future, as the penetration rate of fiberglass in emerging fields such as transportation, electronics, and wind power continues to increase, the upgrading of the industry demand structure of fiberglass will further expand the development space of fiberglass.
In 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with relevant departments, released a stable growth plan for 2023-2024, which covers ten key industrial sectors, including automobiles, power equipment, electronic information manufacturing, machinery, building materials, petrochemicals, and chemicals; at the same time, the country will increase its support for new energy industries and new energy equipment manufacturing industries (especially new energy vehicles, photovoltaics, wind power, new energy storage, lithium batteries and other industries), which will help release effective demand for the fiberglass industry.
Technological progress has increased product variety and optimized product performance, driving the fiberglass industry to open up a broader market amid fluctuations. The expansion of demand is accompanied by the continuous segmentation of the downstream market, the differentiation of supply and demand, and the continuous innovation of products, which makes differentiation increasingly obvious. Markets with low entry barriers will face serious overcapacity, and the advantages of traditional fiberglass products will gradually decline.
Emerging markets in the future (such as photovoltaics, new energy vehicles, high-power wind turbines, new building materials, artificial intelligence, etc.) may bring new profit growth points. The development trend of the fiberglass industry will be high-end and intelligent. Among them, high-end determines the market space, and intelligence opens up the space for cost reduction. Comprehensive fiberglass companies with industry-leading technology, advantageous product structure, excellent quality and service will be better. From the supply side, the pace of new capacity release in the industry has slowed down since 2023, which is beneficial to the subsequent industry recovery.
The global fiberglass market has now formed an oligopoly with a high market concentration and high technical, financial and policy barriers. From the demand side, it is expected to show a weak recovery and slow recovery in the short term. The recovery degree and speed of downstream market demand vary significantly, and product prices will continue to diverge.
In the long run, driven by the dual carbon goals, demand in areas such as wind power, new energy vehicles, electronic appliances, and new building materials is expected to continue to grow. Industry-leading companies will use their respective scale, cost, or R&D advantages to form a differentiated positioning pattern in different segments.
