Ultra-pure wet chemicals: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Ultra-pure wet chemicals, such as electronic-grade sulphuric acid, hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen peroxide and isopropanol, clean and etch chip wafers. Price is set by purification cost and fab qualification, with the base chemical a modest part.
No public price Ultra-pure wet chemicals has no public monthly price series: Sold under fab qualification contracts; no public price index.What its price moves with
Electronic-grade sulphuric acid, mixed with hydrogen peroxide to strip photoresist, is the largest-volume fab chemical. It starts as ordinary acid from burning sulphur, but distillation and trace-metal control add most of the value.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Dilute and buffered hydrofluoric acid etch silicon oxide on wafers. The base acid comes from fluorspar, and Japan's 2019 export curbs on high-purity HF to Korea showed how concentrated and strategic this supply is.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Hydrogen peroxide is used in most wafer cleaning steps. Electronic grade is made by further purifying industrial peroxide, so its price follows the base product loosely but carries a large purity premium.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Isopropanol dries wafers without leaving water spots and cleans equipment. It is made from propylene, so oil and propylene costs set the base price, while semiconductor grade adds purification and packaging costs.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Fluorspar is the mined source of all hydrofluoric acid. Supply is concentrated in China, Mexico and Mongolia, so mining curbs or export rules there can tighten the supply of electronic-grade HF.
No public price for fluorspar, so the link is explained in words only.Wet chemical volumes scale with wafer starts, which are being pushed up by chips for AI data centres. This link is about demand; the data-centre series itself is a power price proxy and does not show chip volumes.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.