About JLC

JLC

JLC, known in full as JLC Network Technology Co., Ltd. and in Chinese as Jinlianchuang, is a Beijing-headquartered provider of commodity market data, pricing and news-information services. It describes itself as China's leading provider of market data and intelligent services for commodities and as a leading institute for digital intelligence services in China's bulk commodity industry. Through its international site at jlcint.com, JLC publishes a continuous, datelined news and commentary wire on energy and chemical markets that is read by traders and analysts following Chinese commodity prices around the world.

Identity and positioning

JLC operates under the Jinlianchuang name in China and the JLC brand internationally. Its self-description, repeated across its English-language platforms, is of a specialist in transparent, high-value and authoritative market intelligence for the commodity market, with expertise covering oil, gas, coal, chemicals, plastics, rubber, fertiliser and metals. Unlike general financial news providers, JLC is a commodity information house in the Chinese price-reporting tradition: its core work is collecting prices and operating data directly from producers, traders and downstream users, assessing those prices, and publishing analysis that explains what is moving physical markets inside China.

Headquarters and branch network

JLC is headquartered in Beijing, with branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and in Zibo and Yantai in Shandong province, and an office in Singapore. The geography is deliberate. Beijing places the head office close to national energy companies, ministries and the headquarters of major state-owned buyers; Shandong is one of China's refining and petrochemical heartlands, home to many of the independent refineries whose crude runs, product prices and margins JLC tracks in detail; Guangzhou covers the south China trading and bunkering markets; and Singapore connects the service to Asia's oil and petrochemical trading hub. Sales contacts listed on its published reports mirror the same structure, with sales teams in Beijing and Singapore serving domestic and international subscribers.

Analyst team and client base

The company states that its professional team comprises hundreds of analysts and research fellows, and that its comprehensive service network covers hundreds of products in over a dozen industries relating to energy and chemicals, delivering to over one point three eight million clients worldwide. That client figure, and the breadth of product coverage behind it, place JLC among the largest of China's commodity information providers. Its analysts provide timely data and intelligent applications covering real-time business information, industry analysis, custom reports, pricing solutions, market research and consultation, and conference and training services, applying technologies including big data and artificial intelligence to the collection and presentation of market information.

The JLC news and commentary wire

The most visible part of JLC's output is its news wire. On jlcint.com, items are published continuously under datelines that identify both the reporting location and the service — "Beijing (JLC)", "Shandong (JLC)" and "Guangzhou (JLC)" — in the manner of a traditional news agency. Typical items report Chinese liquefied natural gas imports and production, LPG inflows and price expectations, propane dehydrogenation unit operating rates, MTBE exports, styrene and polyethylene output, and bunker fuel sales, frequently citing data from the General Administration of Customs of China and the National Bureau of Statistics alongside JLC's own surveys and estimates. JLC says it has provided this market information service for nearly twenty years. For overseas readers, the wire offers something otherwise hard to obtain: same-day, English-language reporting of Chinese physical commodity markets from within those markets, rather than rewritten summaries produced abroad.

Energy coverage

Energy is JLC's deepest field. Its reporting covers crude oil and refined products, liquefied natural gas and pipeline gas, liquefied petroleum gas, coal and bunker fuel. Recurring data series include China's LNG imports, production and price indices; gas-fuelled truck sales; underground gas storage injections; bonded bunker fuel sales and exports; and refinery and PDH operating rates. The JLC China Bunker Market Monthly Report, shared with the Singapore bunkering publication Manifold Times under an arrangement dating from 2020, illustrates the wire's reach: it analyses China's bonded bunker demand, supply, margins and freight indices from JLC's own data. Energy subscribers use such series to follow the world's largest energy-importing market at a level of operational detail — plant rates, port sales, provincial prices — that macroeconomic statistics do not provide.

Chemicals, plastics and wider commodity coverage

Alongside energy, JLC covers the chemical and materials complex in depth: ethylene, propylene and their derivatives, PTA and polyester chains, benzene and styrene, methanol, soda ash, caustic soda, urea and other fertilisers, plastics including polyethylene and polypropylene, rubber, asphalt and related products. Its news archive is organised around energy reports, chemical reports, news and commentary, market prices and the JLC database, and its items routinely combine price assessments with supply-demand analysis — for example tracking how capacity additions reshape polypropylene supply, or how export flows respond to domestic price movements. Coverage also extends to metals and other bulk commodities within its dozen-plus industries, giving subscribers a connected view of China's industrial raw-material markets.

Data products and intelligent services

Beyond the wire, JLC markets structured data and analytical services. Its offer includes market prices, a commodity database, pricing solutions for clients that need assessments embedded in their own contracts or systems, custom reports, market research and consultation. The emphasis in its recent positioning is on digital intelligence: applying big data and artificial intelligence to the analyst-collected information that remains its foundation. This mirrors the direction of the wider Chinese commodity information industry, in which the value of a provider increasingly lies not only in publishing prices but in delivering them as clean, machine-readable data feeds and analytical tools that trading and procurement teams can integrate into daily workflows.

Recognition and standing

In December 2022 JLC announced that it had been listed among Beijing's Best Specialized and Innovative Enterprises for 2022 by the Beijing municipal government, in a ranking administered by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology and based on speciality, fine development of business, uniqueness of service and capacity to innovate. The company presented the listing as recognition of its product research and development, quality control, product delivery and service innovation. Within the industry, JLC is grouped with the small number of Chinese providers — alongside services such as SCI and the metals and coal specialists — whose assessments are quoted internationally as references for Chinese prices. Its combination of a Beijing headquarters, reporting bureaus in the refining provinces, a Singapore office, hundreds of analysts and a client base it counts at over one point three eight million makes JLC one of the principal channels through which the world's commodity markets observe China's physical energy and chemical trade.

How the service is used

The practical value of JLC's output is visible in the way it is consumed. Refiners and petrochemical producers use its operating-rate and margin data to judge competitors and plan runs; traders use its provincial price assessments and import and export tallies, frequently built from General Administration of Customs figures, to price physical cargoes; and bunker suppliers and shipowners follow its bonded bunker sales series, which the company compiles monthly for the China market. Overseas, its English wire is syndicated and cited by specialist publications — the arrangement under which the Singapore bunkering publication Manifold Times has carried JLC's China bunker data since 2020 is one documented example — giving the Beijing service an international readership disproportionate to its profile outside China. The dateline discipline of the wire, with each item attributed to Beijing, Shandong or Guangzhou, allows subscribers to judge the proximity of the reporting to the market concerned, in the same way agency clients have always used datelines. Taken together with its database, pricing solutions and consulting work, the wire makes JLC a full news-agency-style operation for commodities: reporting, assessing and analysing Chinese physical markets continuously, and selling that flow to more than a million clients in China and abroad.