Vision of new market in chemical industry

Before chemical industry 4.0, before Amazon, before windows 97 and even before the Internet, industrial chemical suppliers picked up the phone, wrote a letter and faxed their chemical products to potential customers.

Later, at the beginning of the third millennium, the "wild west" of the Internet began to prevail, and the supply chain of the chemical industry changed from "brick" to "click" to obtain their chemical transactions. As a result, a large number of A-type start-ups were born; elemica, omnixus, rubber network, Ariba, covisinit, Quadrem and chemist hope to find a business model to conquer online chemical trading.

While most focus on the order cash or purchase pay process, some can be seen as the original online chemical market. Some ideas were poorly executed, some ideas were created at the wrong time; none of them really succeeded.

E-commerce has matured in 2019, allowing for a range of different solutions that have seen the spread of a slower and more cautious online chemical market. Their differences come from different starting points.

As Simon Hardy, a chemical industry consultant at elemica, points out, "in today's business economy, we see chemical companies taking various approaches to generate market revenue. From the industry itself, you have solutions for the chemical industry, such as chemondis, onetwo Chem and covestro select. Another group either came from the chemical distribution industry or found a gap in the market and set up a company to solve the problem. These include gobuychem and pintools. Agnostic platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon are also growing in this market. Recently, we have also seen the interest of eBay, which has operated a very successful B2B market for the aviation industry. "

Despite the actions of the larger companies, there is still a long list of online chemical trading spaces created by start-ups; buyersguide Chem, lookchem and globalchemade; all trying to let everyone know that they exist. Which will survive depends on three main factors:

Function. The web page is the most fluent and the product selection is the most extensive.

The persistence of investors. How long are investors in these companies prepared to bear the loss (hoping to become the next Alibaba) before they stop investing?

Another big player enters the market. As Hardy mentioned, Alibaba, Amazon and eBay have tentatively expanded into the sales of industrial chemicals. But what if Bayer, Dow DuPont or Ineos make a significant investment? Their technology, market influence and bank balance may change the rules of the game.

It is hoped that the chemical industry can wisely avoid B2C style click bait marketing, but no one can be sure that the market will not develop in this direction.

Although chemical purchasing officers usually have higher than average IQ, we are all human beings and tend to use the basic marketing tools for selling ice cream and toothpaste. Most likely, the chemical industry will get the online market it deserves.

On the contrary, we can only hope that the customer-centric online market will succeed.

As Hardy points out, "today's buyers want to order by B2C, where they know their orders will be delivered at any time, when, where and when."

Touching information on tablets is a real benefit that the online chemical market can offer. Although for an industry with such long delivery time and complex logistics, it seems impossible to achieve this goal; time and money can achieve great things.

Because if only 10% of the chemical industry's $5 trillion annual revenue comes from the online market in the next decade, it will create a $500 billion sub industry. This kind of money can do a very smooth website and order tracking.

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Finance/9384-Vision-of-new-market-in-chemical-industry.html