Vitamins: Cycles

Fires, outages and cartels: the wildest prices in chemicals

What this tab covers How its prices and margins move: past booms and busts with price levels, the spread or margin that the industry watches, the drivers of the cycle and the metrics to track.

Vitamin prices are among the most volatile in chemicals because a few plants make each vitamin. An outage at one site can double or triple prices within weeks; new Chinese capacity then drags them down for years. Demand is steady, tied to feed and supplement volumes. The floor is Chinese cash cost; the ceiling is customers cutting doses in premixes. A price-fixing cartel run by Roche, BASF and others in the 1990s was fined in 2001 (EU, about EUR 855 million, indicative). Weak prices in 2023-2025 pushed dsm-firmenich out of animal nutrition.

The spread to watch No public spread; price against cash cost

Vitamin D3: cost about RMB 50/kg against quotes of RMB 200-600/kg (2025-2026, Faxian Gongchang). For A and E, producer margins show in NHU's net margin of about 30% in 2025 (RMB 6.764 billion profit on RMB 22.251 billion revenue, derived).

Booms and busts

2017-2018
A fire at BASF's Ludwigshafen citral plant (Oct 2017) cut vitamin A and E supply for months (indicative).
vitamin A and E prices rose several-fold (indicative; numbers not reached)
2023-2024 trough
Chinese capacity growth and weak feed demand pushed vitamin A to about RMB 98/kg and VE to RMB 94.5/kg.
RMB 98/kg vitamin A, about $14/kg (Faxian Gongchang; RMB 7.2 per $ (indicative))
Aug 2024
Explosion at BASF Ludwigshafen on 29 July 2024 removed a large share (stated as 26.7%) of vitamin A and 13.8% of VE capacity.
vitamin A from RMB 98/kg to about RMB 230/kg in two weeks; VE from RMB 94.5 to 165/kg (Faxian Gongchang)
2025-2026
BASF returned and prices fell back: VA annual average down 41.87% in 2025 and VE down 15.06%; VA then recovered from RMB 59/kg (Jan 2026) to RMB 98/kg (7 May 2026).
VE RMB 80-100/kg in 2026 (Faxian Gongchang)

What drives the cycle

Plant outages. A single fire at BASF moved world prices by more than 100% in 2024.
Chinese capacity. New Chinese lines bring long troughs.
Feed demand. Pig and poultry herds and African swine fever.
Corporate exits. dsm-firmenich's sale of animal nutrition and BASF's restarts change supply discipline.

Metrics to track

Metric	Why it matters	Where to track it
Chinese and European vitamin A and E spot prices	Main price signals	Chinese trade press; Expana; Faxian Gongchang
NHU, Zhejiang Medicine and Garden Bio results	Margin cycle	Shenzhen and Shanghai exchange filings
China vitamin exports (HS 2936)	Volume and price pressure	China Customs; UN Comtrade