Latin America’s trade in commodity polymers in 2024 was characterized by sizable exports of HDPE, polypropylene homopolymer (PP) and uncompounded PVC (PVCU). Latin America was a growth import market for each of the commodity polymers, noting especially both large volumes and large percentage increases on linear/ethylene-alpha-olefin-copolymers (LL/EAOC), HDPE, PP, and PVCU. This series of blogs quantifies imports and exports of the major commodity polymers – LDPE, LL/EAOC, HDPE, EVA, PP, PRC, polystyrene and PVCU – allowing comparisons across the polymers for the geographic regions of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Most of Latin America’s exports of both HDPE and PVCU were out of Mexico. Colombia, Brazil and Argentina shipped most of the polypropylene. The export volumes shown for these commodity polymers are, however, overstated because Mexico (and to a lesser degree other Latin American countries) suppresses much of its actual country of destination data, showing it as country “other” in the statistics. Actual export destinations appear in trading partner import statistics and add to the totals.

Latin America was a growth import market for all the commodity polymers, noting increases of 20-28% over 2023 on LL/EAOC, PP and PVCU. North America supplied 83-97% of Latin America’s LDPE, LL/EAOC, HDPE and PVCU imports. A surge in imports of PP from Saudi Arabia, China and South Korea dropped North America’s share for that polymer to 44%. Increased volumes from Korea and Western Europe of PRC were key factors reducing North America’s share to 52%.

From International Trader Publications’ continuously updated World Trade Analyses of all grades of commodity polymers.