How much would you pay for resin pricing? The Chinese government is offering it free of charge to the public through an online platform that just went online yesterday.

The "Guangdong Price Center" Web site, in Chinese language only, houses an enormous amount of pricing data, including prices for more than 3,000 products and grades, seven merchandise price indexes, as well as pricing analysis and forecasts.

The Web site is run by the Guangdong Price Bureau and authorized by the National Development and Reform Commission. The datacenter aims to establish the "Guangdong prices" as a benchmark for China's other regions and international markets, provide guidance for manufacturers, and upgrade industrial sectors.

The site collects information from 130 member companies in Guangdong province, including the Guangdong Plastics Exchange and the Lecong Defu Plastics City.

The pricing for plastics resins can be accessed here [click the fourth yellow folder on the left], which, as of my writing, includes 37,250 transactions that happened between January 12, 2007 and June 18, 2010. The good news is that you don't have to be able to read Chinese to take advantage of these data. The product names are mostly in English, such as PVC, LDPE, and PMMA, and the pricies are yuan per metric ton.

If you need help with the other fields in Chinese, feel free to drop me a line or post questions here.

Now, have fun exploring the data center.