Domestic methionine to support the development of the feed industry needs to overcome the status of tariff inequality
Methionine, the scientific name of methionine, is an essential sulfur-containing amino acid in animals. It cannot be produced by itself, but must be obtained from the outside. Therefore, it is widely used in medicine and health, food and feed industry, especially feed industry, and its intake directly affects the growth and health of cultured animals.
Methionine production has the characteristics of high technical threshold, large investment, high concentration of product sales (more than 90% used as feed additives) and so on. Since the last century, the global methionine production has been mainly concentrated in the hands of several large traditional multinational chemical giants, such as Wincreate, Andisu, Novus and Sumitomo.
In the late 1950s, due to the development of the pharmaceutical industry, China began to study the chemical synthesis of methionine. However, in general, there is a big gap between these production units and foreign advanced technology, and the scale is small, the output is very limited, it is difficult to meet the domestic demand. Before 2010, the domestic demand for methionine basically relies on imports, and there is no capacity to produce methionine on a large scale. It can be said that methionine is the most recent large variety of all the key feed additives.
In 1992, a local enterprise in Tianjin introduced a methionine production unit with an annual output of 10,000 tons from France at a price of 1.3 billion yuan, hoping to create a new way of digestion and absorption and gradually promote localization. However, due to many factors such as immature technology and imperfect supporting facilities, this device has not been able to achieve normal operation. Long-term trial production and renovation investment have brought great pressure to Tianjin Chemical Plant, and the project was discontinued in 2000.
In 2008, Chongqing Unigroup paid for the tianjin plant, which had been idle for eight years, and moved its technicians to Chongqing. After more than one year's efforts, the plant finally started up successfully, produced qualified products, and expanded the capacity to 50,000 tons/year in 2013. In order to give play to its location and cost advantages, Chongqing Ziguang set up Ningxia Ziguang Tianhua Methionine Co., LTD in Zhongwei city to start the construction of methionine device. The first phase of Ningxia Ziguang plant was completed and put into operation in the second half of 2014, and the second phase of the plant was completed and put into operation in the second half of 2016, which gradually stabilized methionine production and made a solid step for the domestication of methionine.
In 2007, Xinhe Cheng established a research and development team of more than 50 people, which, together with tianjin University, Zhejiang University and other universities and institutes, focused on solving technical problems in the synthesis of methionine.
In April 2015, the China Petrochemical Association organized an expert group to review the complete set of new and synthetic methionine technologies, and concluded that they had "reached the international advanced technological level", and that the "smell" problem, which had plagued the process of methionine nationalization for decades, had also been properly solved.
On January 9, 2017, shandong Xinhe Phase I methionine production unit with an annual output of 50,000 tons was completed and successfully launched for trial production, which is the first large-scale, green and integrated methionine production unit in China with complete independent intellectual property rights. After more than half a year of debugging, optimization, product quality to meet all customer requirements, the best-selling products at home and abroad. Xinhe Cheng raised 4.9 billion yuan through non-public issuance, providing financial guarantee for further expansion of methionine. In the later stage, the company's total production capacity will reach 300,000 tons/year.
The largest consumer market for methionine is feed additives. In recent years, the development of China's aquaculture industry has accelerated, and the output of pork, poultry and eggs has ranked first in the world. The demand for methionine in the Chinese market in 2018 is about 250,000 tons, of which about 180,000 tons are imported. In 2019, the demand consumption of feed grade methionine in China is about 260,000 tons, and the demand for feed grade methionine in China is expected to grow at a rate of 5%~6% in the future. In order to meet the growth of the domestic food industry demand, and maintain core feed ingredients in active status, methionine domestic enterprises expanding investment, increase production capacity, to ensure the safety in domestic feed industry supply and reduce the cost of feed production, maintenance relations more than ten of the Chinese people's "vegetable basket" and meet the national demand for high quality protein.
Domestic methionine before 2010 average of about 40 yuan/kg, the domestic enterprise into methionine production after 2010, major foreign manufacturers expanding production at the same time, the market competition pattern changes to methionine prices decline, but domestic enterprises shut down briefly at the end of 2013, foreign periodic shortages of supply, causing prices to irrational fluctuations, market price of the most high to 120, 2014 yuan/kg, downstream enterprises to bear the cost of huge pressure; Since 2015, due to new entrants to domestic manufacturers and increases production of the leading enterprises, the market competition is intense, price continued to fall below 20 yuan/kg, according to the domestic use of 250000 tons/year, methionine prices for domestic downstream feed breeding enterprise cost savings each year, 5 billion yuan of above average price (2007-2010, methionine, about 40 yuan/kg).
The localization of methionine is conducive to maintaining methionine price in a reasonable range, promoting the safe and stable development of the whole industry chain from raw materials, premix, feed and breeding industry, promoting the benign development of the industry, and promoting the competitiveness of the whole industry chain in the global market.
At the same time, the steady development of domestic methionine also has the need to break the tariff inequality. Methionine product exports to the us tariff is 25% in our country, the follow-up may increase to 30%, exports to Europe at 6.5%, while China's imports from Singapore, Malaysia and other countries to zero tariffs, tariff inequality grave damage to the development of the domestic methionine industry, harmful to the development of domestic upstream and downstream industry needs related policies, break the tariff unequal status, make domestic methionine enterprises to avoid being killed at the early stage of growth, although in the short term is to support the methionine localization of enterprise, in the long term is to maintain the domestic feed industry healthy and steady development.
Domestic enterprises such as shares and state, east hope all planned production of methionine plan, combined with the new and into, purple light, such as forerunner, domestic methionine must be able to meet the growing domestic demand, but also driving the development of related industries methionine industry chain and intermediate, enhance the competitiveness of the feed, food and intermediate products, promote the healthy and stable development of national economy.
