If there’s one thing anyone knows about the helium business, it’s perhaps how prone to shortage the market has historically been, or at least since the turn of the century.
From shortage (2006/7) to balance, shortage (2011-2013) to surplus, and shortage (2018-2019) to balance again by 2020, as this decade began we had already experienced three notable (and named) shortages in just 14 years. That became four in 15 years when Helium Shortage 4.0 came into effect, and so the story of shortages in the global helium business has been written over the last two decades.
That playbook is entering a new chapter, however, with Helium Shortage 4.0 widely accepted to have reached its conclusion this year and expectations for a period of relative calm ahead in the supply-demand equation. All of which poses the questions, how long might that prevail and what comes next?
A new chapter
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