It has been recorded that the first chemical to be mass-produced through industrial chemical manufacturing processes was the highly-valued sulfuric acid, with several brave attempts at creating the first successful chemical company dating as far back as the Industrial Revolution. These daring English inventors made use of crude methods and inadequate equipment to produce this first chemical product, yet they still pulled it off somehow and made history.
Today, on the other hand, we only need to type ‘chemical companies near me’ into a search engine to come across countless results of chemical companies in our area. In these modern times, there are countless types of business endeavors specializing in industrial chemical manufacturing, and where we once talked of a few thousand tons of product representing a successful annual production, we now measure success by the millions of metric tons and tens of billions of dollars.
"The definition of a chemical manufacturing company has transformed over the decades - evolve or die is the new strategy that a chemical company must apply if it wishes to survive the constant changes of the modern era."
- Ryan Esner, CEO
What makes a successful chemical company?
To start, a chemical manufacturing company must be consistent in what it does: the failure of many businesses in the industrial chemical manufacturing field has resulted from attempts to apply a scattershot strategy and branching into too many different chemical businesses. Even the biggest industrial chemical manufacturing companies, such as the German BASF and American Dow Chemical have agreed to sell secondary product units to small companies in recent years, accepting defeat in certain unsuccessful enterprises.
Another interesting reason – and perhaps contradictory one, considering the previous paragraph – that can make a chemical manufacturing company fail is to ignore the market and the trends that the industry is following at a given time, especially for long periods. The heads of a chemical company must be smart in terms of investing for the future, avoiding the mistake of putting all eggs into one proverbial basket. Many companies have already collapsed over the years due to a sudden decline in the requirement of their most prized product and the fact that they didn’t have a back-up product to guarantee continued operation.
The current situation of industrial chemical manufacturing
Many a chemical company has learned that the evolve or die strategy of other business ventures applies equally to those involved in the production of chemical products: commodity chemicals have gradually been replaced with specialty chemicals, petrochemical solvents and secondary products have been phased out for safer and greener bio-based compounds, and traditional sales systems have developed into the more flexible and personalized service of offering turnkey chemical solutions.
Where a chemical company once had to simply start producing a high-quality product in mass and begin distributing to whoever needed it, the standards of the market have grown to such levels that only the industrial chemical manufacturing companies with the best customer service and expertise have a chance to continue making significant revenue in the modern industry.
So, the next time you decide to search for those ‘chemical companies near me’ on your web browser, make sure to find the one that conducts their business in the most intelligent and effective manner possible. After all, it’s the only way you can guarantee they’ll stick around and keep providing you with what you need for the coming years.
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