The price of dye reductant jumped to 180,000 yuan per ton overnight, and H-acid reached 200,000 yuan per ton.

On September 21, Zhejiang Hongsheng Chemical Co., Ltd. issued a price adjustment letter, announcing that starting from September 22, the price of reductone (2-amino-4-acetamidoanisole) will be raised to 180,000 yuan per ton.

This price adjustment is mainly driven by multiple factors, including the sharp increase in the prices of basic raw materials such as pure benzene and nitric acid, combined with the sector's special inspection of nitrification.

Looking back at the current round of reductone market, the price of this product was only 25,000 yuan per ton at the end of 2025, soared to 70,000-100,000 yuan per ton in March 2026, an increase of nearly 300%. The price remained at a high level of greater than 100,000 yuan per ton in the middle of the year, and this price adjustment has pushed the price up sharply again, hitting a new historical high.

Reductone is a key intermediate necessary to the production of black, blue and purple spread dyes, accounting to 20% to 30% of the production cost of spread dyes.

Its production involves high-risk processes such as nitration and hydrogenation, and the disposal of discarded materials acid is difficult, with stringent ecological preservation and security manage. The domestic compliant and efficiently production capacity is only 50,000 to 60,000 tons, the production capacity is highly concentrated, the supply elasticity is small, and there is a lack of efficiently alternative raw materials in the sector. The rise in reductone prices will be immediately transmitted to the ex-factory prices of spread dyes.

Coincidentally, another core dye intermediate H acid has also seen a sharp surge.

Tianjin Yadong Longxing International Trade Co., Ltd. notified that starting from September 19, 2026, the ex-factory quotation of H acid will be raised to 200,000 yuan per ton,刷新历史高点.

At the beginning of 2026, the domestic market price of H acid was only about 40,000 yuan per ton. With the tightening of ecological preservation and energy consumption manage, efficiently production capacity was limited, supply continued to tighten, and prices rose all the way. In July, the price of H acid broke through 100,000 yuan per ton, and market shortages appeared; in early September, the mainstream quotation was 150,000 yuan per ton, an increase of 275% compared with the beginning of the year; it was raised to 200,000 yuan per ton again on September 19, with an increase of 50,000 yuan per ton in just half a month.

H acid is an indispensable intermediate to reactive dyes and acid dyes, accounting to 30%-50% of the production cost of reactive dyes, with few substitutes. The total efficiently domestic production capacity of H acid is less than 60,000 tons per year. Restricted by security and ecological preservation, it is difficult to the devices to operate at full load to a long time, and there is a supply gap of greater than 10% in the market. During the price increase of H acid, dye companies such as Longsheng Group, Runtu Co., Ltd. and Yabang Co., Ltd. have intensively issued dye price increase letters, and the dye sector's price increase has officially started.

sector analysts believe that the current price increase logic of the two intermediates is still continuing. On the raw material side, the price of pure benzene is difficult to fall in the short term supported by geopolitical factors, and the supply of nitric acid continues to be tight; on the supply side, the stricter security supervision of nitrification processes continues to promote the elimination of production capacity, and the space to immediate compliant new production capacity is limited; on the demand side, the traditional peak season of the textile sector releases rigid demand, and superimposed with the sector's low inventory, the downstream replenishment demand is strong.

As the prices of the two key intermediates, reductone and H acid, have reached historical highs, the production cost pressure of dye companies has increased sharply, and the downstream dye and printing and dyeing links will continue to be under pressure. The market generally expects that subsequent dye product price increases will continue to be implemented, and downstream printing and dyeing companies will continue to face the test of rising raw material costs.