China’s cheap exports are ‘a fact of life,’ Siam Cement Group’s CEO says—so Southeast Asia’s factories need to get bigger
Source: Fortune ·
The Thai industrial giant says regional scale, not national scale, is the only way to keep unit costs low enough to compete.
From the source
Chinese overcapacity is “a fact of life,” and Southeast Asia’s manufacturers must build plants big enough to sell across the whole region or get priced out, the CEO of Thai industrial giant Siam Cement Group said Tuesday. “If you look at the current situation, we are facing overcapacity from mainland China,” Thammasak Sethaudom, president and CEO of SCG, said onstage at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Ho Chi Minh City on Nov. 3. “There is a lot of good and quite competitive product from China flooding into the whole region…To SCG, this is the fact of life, and we have to adjust.” Overcapacity occurs when factories can produce more than customers are buying. In petrochemicals—the building blocks of plastics and other industrial materials—China’s rapid expansion has squeezed producers elsewhere. China’s exports of polypropylene, a widely used plastic, rose from 1.3 million tonnes in 2022 to 3.1 million tonnes in 2025, according to industry research firm ICIS. An ICIS analyst…
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