Recently, affected by the situation in the Middle East, many chemical companies have increased the prices of their silicone product series.
Silicone is an extremely widely used chemical. The increase in prices of upstream products will also be transmitted to the entire industry chain. Industries including cosmetics are expected to be affected by price increases.
On March 24, Germany's Wacker Chemical suddenly announced that it would increase the price of silicone products from April 1. In a statement from Wacker Chemicals, the company said the price increase was due to military conflicts in the Middle East severely disrupting global supply chains, resulting in significant increases in energy, raw material and logistics costs.
China Business News reporter learned that WACKER Silicones is one of the world's largest manufacturers of silicone products, supplying more than 2,800 highly specialized innovative silicone products, which are widely used in automobiles, construction, chemicals, cosmetics, medical technology, energy and electronics, paper and textiles and other fields. In 2025, Wacker Chemical's silicone business contributed about half of the group's revenue.
Wacker Chemical did not announce the specific range of the new round of price adjustments. However, it said that the price adjustment ranges of various products are different, and the sales team will maintain communication with customers in the near future to provide specific information about products and business.
Wacker Chemie is not the first silicone manufacturer to adjust prices. At the beginning of this month, Dow's Consumer Products Solutions Division issued a notice to partners in Greater China, announcing that it would increase product prices starting from March 27. The core business of this division is mainly silicone products. The company expects this round of price increases to range from 5% to 15%.
The trend of rising silicone prices has been evident long before the outbreak of conflicts in the Middle East. In November last year, Dow Chemical implemented a 10% to 20% price increase on a number of core silicone products; in January this year, Dow Chemical implemented a 5% to 10% price increase on its high-performance construction business products.
Wacker Chemical also announced at the end of January this year that it would implement a price increase of at least 25% on its main silicone products starting from February 1 to cope with the sharp increase in commodity prices.
Silicone products include silicone oil, silicone emulsion, silicone resin, silicone elastomer, sealant, silanes, silane-modified polymers and fumed silica. Take silicone oil, for example, which is used in daily cosmetics and personal care products such as shampoo.
Recently, affected by the price increase of upstream raw materials, some cosmetics companies have announced price increases. La Prairie, a high-end skin care brand owned by German cosmetics giant Beiersdorf Group, said it will raise the prices of some products in the Chinese market in April this year, with an increase of between 3% and 5%. La Prairie's product prices range from a few thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.
In response to this round of price increases of organic silicon, a senior R&D researcher in the chemical industry told China Business News that since the beginning of this year, the price of organic silicon has increased due to factors such as exchange rates, and the situation in the Middle East has intensified the rising costs. He also said that cosmetics may take the opportunity to increase prices, although the cost of cosmetic raw material formulas accounts for a relatively small proportion of the entire product cost.
"Although the price increase of raw materials will definitely affect the cost of cosmetics to a certain extent, for example, the cost of emulsifiers and oil bases in cream products will be affected, but you must know that the formula cost of cosmetics is sometimes not even as high as the packaging cost, so the impact of raw materials will not be great, and marketing and other expenses will really account for the bulk." The above-mentioned industry experts said.
He believes that for cleaning daily chemical products such as detergents, the impact of raw material costs will be greater. "The main raw material for the active agent on the surface of these cleaning products is petroleum, and the increase in petroleum prices will definitely lead to an increase in costs."
