Asian Railway Market Becomes The New Target of

As developed countries are cutting back their usage of plastic products, Asian countries are growing to be the new rising market of plastic product and engineering plastics. It is known that the demand of the clothes racks of made-to-wear clothing industry and market engineer plastics products in Bengal will be increasing rapidly. Bengal imported about 40 million dollars of raw materials such as polypropylene. The demand for plastic products in other Asian countries and Middle East regions has approached to 6 percent in recent years. The production of polypropylene in the world will double in 2013, reaching 3.5 billion tons. Plastic products or polymer composites have always been exploring the development space in metro industry. The largest train compartment manufacturer in the world, Bombardier has seen huge market in the application of plastic and new materials in energy saving and vibration reduction aspects. Railway industry has always adhered to the traditional conservative style in terms of material selection while the train designers from Japan have displayed innovation and creation in their design. Therefore, it is predicted that an increasing amount of new materials will be adopted in metro construction in the near future. Given that the new types of compound materials have replaced the metal materials in the current aviation industry, Bombardier Company will absorb useful information from aviation engineers when designing the compartment of metro trains. The energy consumed by the metro in one hour is equivalent to one plane, therefore, energy saving is a vital element in this process. Railway market marks a brand new field for resin manufacturer, Bayer Company. Bayer's regional manager in Europe of the metro transportation and railway projects, Wim Van Eynde claimed that the application percentage of plastic and other new materials in transportation industry is not obvious enough. He added that: currently, it is difficult to say how big a percentage of traditional outdated materials will be replaced by new types of thermoplastic products; although the lightweight trend of railway market has become the hot topic, the application of thermoplastic products in railway industry represents as a new totally new subject. Major train compartment manufacturers such as Bombardier have been dedicated to manufacturing compartments with metal materials; engineer plastics suppliers will embrace huge opportunity if big companies like Bombardier start to shift their focus to plastic market. As the strong demand in European market and the newly stimulated demand in Asian market, compound materials in railway industry will continue to maintain a good momentum of growth before 2015 just like it did in the last five years.