China’s top ethylene producer, Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co Ltd, said higher petrochemical prices and production helped more than triple its first-half net profit.

The company, a unit of Asia’s largest refiner, Sinopec Corp, said average selling prices of its four major products — intermediate petrochemicals, petroleum products, resins and plastics and synthetic fibres — rose between 10.58 per cent and 24.77 per cent.
The Shanghai-based firm processed 481,000 tonnes of ethylene, up 4.24 per cent year on year. Ethylene is a basic building block for manufacturing petrochemicals used in plastics.
China’s thirst for petrochemicals is fuelled by an economy that grew 9.1 per cent last year.
“Output and demand in the petrochemical industry as a whole grew steadily during the first half, with overall growth in product prices and continued expansion of imports and exports,” the firm’s chairman Lu Yiping said.