Naphtha shortages in Japan
nippon.com
nippon.com
People from my generation aren’t buying Calbee because the bag is colorful. They’re buying it because it’s Calbee and they already know what they’re getting. The packaging could be black and white and I’d still recognize it instantly.
The only people I could see being briefly confused are younger consumers. Japanese packaging tends to be very colorful, so we’re all conditioned to identify products partly by color. But people adapt quickly. In fact, a black-and-white Calbee bag might end up standing out more on a crowded supermarket shelf than yet another brightly colored package.
There’s also a chance this ends up being a net positive. If simpler packaging lowers costs and sales stay the same, why go back? Japanese consumers are feeling inflation more than they have in decades, and companies are under pressure too. Cutting costs in a place customers barely notice seems a lot smarter than shrinking the product or raising prices again.
In reality packaging is a very big part of marketing. People are drawn by vivid and bright colors, which is especially relevant in the modern world where unfortunately so many of us are living in a permanent hyper-stimulated state. It's hard to ignore well-designed packaging with tastefully chosen colors even if you're someone who is mindful about their eating/consumption choices and you know that what's inside that packaging is totally different from what you see from the outside.
At this point the United States is the least prepared country in the world and Americans are going to be the hardest hit, simply because we have the most to lose.
Papering over the canary in the coal mine never saved the coal miners.
(Edit spelling)
OBEY.
According to wiki, 8% of males and 0.5% of female suffer from colorblindness. That means for the rest of the people, the color is part of the information that our brain use subconsciously when we go and grab a bag of Calbee.
Will it affect the Japanese general public? Minor inconvenience for sure. Will it affect sales? Probably for area popular by tourist? Maybe it move the needle by 1%?
But what's important that's below the fold is there could be other knock on effect as naphtha is used to make other product.
What is even more alarming is that more than half of the Japanese public supports the Takaichi administration, which is implementing such absurd policies.
Everything I can find says the shortages now are due to the Iran war.
Not exactly. Japan only produces around 40% of it's naphtha domestically, with 40% from the Middle East and the other 20% from other sources. Much of the pain arose from supply shock for the 40% sources from the ME.
That said, much of the pain around naphata is transitional, as most Japanese imports of naphtha have now shifted away from the Middle East to Algeria, the US, and India [0][1].
Mind you, this is eating significantly into margins, but it is survivable as this isn't Japan's first black swan event of similar calibre - the late 2000s and early 2010s oil price shock occurred during a much more difficult macro environment for Japan, and at least according to ONG analysts [2] (behind login, as most actionable commodities news is) Japan has the reserves needed for around a year of production assuming Japan didn't begin shifting sourcing, which it did.
I'd recommend reading Overseas Energy Investment of Korea and Japan: How did Two East Asian Resources-Rare Industrial Giants Respond to Energy Security Challenges by Oh Seong-ik [3] to learn more about the Korean and Japanese energy security policy - both are using the same methodology, strategies, and contract structures, and despite public rhetoric, a large portion of younger Koreans targeting the Blue House and/or high finance still try to attend Waseda for their undergrad if SKY, KAIST, or Ewha doesn't work out.
[0] - https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/iran-tensions/iran-war/jap...
[1] - https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
[2] - https://direct.argusmedia.com/newsandanalysis/article/280064...
[3] - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-0285-9
The 2022 Russia-Ukraine War led to a temporary shock like this as did the Iraqi Civil War and the subsequent surge in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Life is filled with black swans and it truly sucks at the individual level, but at the macro-level this is transitionary.
Also, for the Japanese government, the housing pain is less worrisome than it's downstream impact on cracking.
What does cracking mean in this context?
Do you have a citation for this? This sounds insane. I can't even think of any good faith motivation for doing this, other than to cover up the shortage and to keep the public pacified.
The title reads "PM's Office calls Calbee's response a "stunt"; Emphasizes naphtha sufficiency, including intermediate products".
Asahi Shinbun is one of the established newspapers.
Also at the end (translated by google):
> "The government interviewed Calbee about the situation on the 12th. According to a government official, they explained to Calbee that there is a sufficient amount available in terms of total volume. Sources close to the Prime Minister expressed concern over the ripple effects, stating, "Calbee's reaction is an overreaction. Their announcement will cause other companies to become anxious as well." However, Calbee maintains its stance, with a public relations representative stating, "This is a measure to ensure the stable supply of our products."
So it's relatively mild "nudge", if you compare it to the current US administration.
Yes
In half a year, maybe, but I and many I talk to are skeptical their huge scale supply chain is running out of printing material in such a short amount of time. I'm voting with my yen by not buying Calbee products for now.
This all started in the White House and we must never let them get away with it.
We don't but we worry about similar issues caused by the same root cause.
But Material Design is such boring dredge at this point that I think I actually prefer the lazy photocopy style that is shown instead. :)
One idea is if they had a monocrome design from say the 50's use that. Or get a true artist to come up with something.
BUT. I must say, the packaging looks so much better in black and white.
It makes me think it's an honest product, whatever that means. Good feeling. Put your name on it, black on white. Sell it.
I've never seen a place throw away more plastics than in Japan.
If the current oil situation forces a reworking of this system, I'd say all in all, that's an upside.
Japan: Approximately 28% of all passenger kilometers are traveled by rail
United States: Rail travel accounts for only about 0.25% of passenger kilometers
Remember: when you drive your 30mpg car to work, 20 miles down the freeway, alone in your vehicle by yourself, you are burning over a gallon of refined petroleum product every single day. You can make a loooooot of plastic bags with that much oil.
Something like 95% of Americans get to work via automobile.
I’d love if the US had better public transport and I could get rid of my car, it costs more per month than my housing (which is admittedly cheap)
They use double the oil of the entire EU despite having half the population.
Triple the usage of ASEAN despite having a little less than half the population.
Five times the usage of India despite India having four times the population.
I believe personal transportation is something like half of all oil use globally last I checked.
I don’t even think it’s about getting rid of your car entirely, it’s about a wild amount of dependence and a crazy economic incentive system where a 20mpg work truck has been the most popular vehicle in the country for decades. 100% of trips taken per week needing a car is a big consumption difference than 70% of trips taken per week needing a car.
The average American commute time is something like 20-25 minutes and if that involves highway travel, 20 miles isn’t a crazy assumption.
Rely more on statistics and less on personal observation.
Japan has about half the plastic waste rate, yes [1].
However, the top recycling search result claims Japan only has a 19% recycling rate compared to the US’s 24% [2], but you might have been referring to a specific recycling type?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country
See Table 1 here and its sources:
https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/how-japan-is-usin...
Japan recycles about 24% of its used consumer plastics into new products, while the US recycles about 8%. That's NOT factoring in thermal recycling, which Japan is far better at than the US.
https://www.mitsui.com/solution/en/contents/solutions/circul...
>it produces CO2 and toxic substances when it is burned.
(Films are very difficult to sort automatically; we landfill them here in SF.)
The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.
This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.
So dressed like a lover
Frigid winter day
Other companies have said that they're facing shortages, but if you don't read/believe the news, it's easy to ignore. Calbee is the first large corporation to make it unavoidably apparent that there are shortages, and that if things don't change, it's going to be much worse than mere ink shortages.
As a personal example, medicine that my doctor prescribed used to come in individually wrapped packs. It was like this for years. Due to plastic shortages, it's now all put into a single bag. Environmentally speaking it's better and I don't mind. But it's a massive shift and this is just the start of the shortage. With no solution in sight, and with shortage resolution taking months even if the war ended tomorrow, it's going to get worse and there's no way around it.
This is what "globalized supply chain" looks like up close.
If that's the extent of it I'd say they're doing relatively fine. People have been taking these events like covid as some glaring warning of globalized supply chains but given that we've had like ten major supply chain shocks in half as many years I feel like the supply chains are good actually.
If you told me ten years ago that North Koreans are fighting in Europe, Russia's oil facilities are being hit by drones, Houthis are launching rockets into space and the largest trade route in the world is blocked I'd have guessed it's worse than 4% inflation and Japan's running out of printer ink
(with the obvious caveat that less demand means less production, which would mean there wouldn't be a lot of surplus. But in a world where we don't burn so much oil, it probably wouldn't be worth either party closing the Strait anyway...)
Search Tesco Value or Sainsbury's Basics for the 1990s version.
I mean look who benefits from this, arms companies and oil/gas companies are having a bonanza.
If countries start getting away with selling oil in other currencies, then they wouldn't funnel back all these vasts amounts of dollars into the S&P 500 and the American economy would collapse.
Iran hasn’t been dollar denominated for decades at this point, they wish they could be! It would make their oil more valuable.
The panels will land in ROTW.