Industrial chemical shipments continue strong summer

September 17, 2021

Industrial Chemical shipments in Canada continued to show strength through the summer months, according to Statistics Canada’s monthly survey of labour and manufacturing for July. Compared to one year ago, shipments are up an impressive 28 per cent through July and by 36 per cent compared to July 2020. This comes on the back of high demand across all chemical sub-sectors and near record strength in resin demand. Overall industrial chemical shipments in 2021 are near the decade highs seen in 2018. 

Plastic product manufacturing is showing a similar level of demand strength with shipments surging nearly 18 per cent above 2020 levels to the highest levels seen on a dollar basis in our dataset. This is a result of high demand across most plastic manufacturing sub-sectors led by packaging and building materials. The impacts of the well-publicized supply chain disruptions in automotive manufacturing are limiting further gains, as shipments of plastic motor vehicle parts are down 34 per cent from 2019 levels when supply chains were operating normally.