By John Richardson
ALICE ASKED the Chesire cat perched in a tree, “what road do I take?” to which the cat asked, “where are you going?” Alice admitted, “I don’t know.” The cat’s response was, “then it doesn’t matter. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865, has always been more than just a fabulous children’s story.
Such is the plight of some chemicals companies as they recognise the need for change, but don’t know exactly what change looks like as they struggle to decide which road to take.
I see the problem here as being bogged down in the details, getting stuck in the weeds, when the details are simply unknowable right now. But what we do know and must determine at the C-suite level – and this would then trickle down to every level of organisation – is the overall direction. The details will sort themselves out later.
At least, though, this group of chemicals companies recognises there’s a need to head in potentially a new direction. I believe there’s another group that thinks, “there’s nothing to worry about here. Markets will correct themselves, so we just need to wait until the downturn is over”.
The central question, as always, for each board is where their company’s competitive advantage will lie in five-10 years from now. But while the central question might not have changed, the answers will be very different than during the 1992-2021 Chemicals Supercycle.
As a reminder, these are the ten interconnected reasons why I believe that the Chemicals Supercycle is over. Click on the links in the slide for the relevant background.
There seems to be a choice of only two major roads
The first question each commodity chemicals company needs to answer is this: “Can we continue to compete in the global commodity chemicals space, or do we instead need to become a niche, higher-value player?”
There will be many, many shades of grey between these two extremes. But C-suites should start with a binary choice as I believe that:
- The truly global and ever-expanding commodity players are likely to be in the Middle East, the US and Canada only because of feedstock advantages – and connected to feedstocks, the push to convert more oil into chemicals.
- We don’t know whether China can be a major global export player in commodity chemicals (maybe in some value chains where it is already the dominant player) because of geopolitics. What seems clearer is that by itself, and with its geopolitical partners, it is likely to continue its push to greater commodity chemicals self-sufficiency.
- This leaves the rest of the world – barring a few state-owned oil-to-gas-and-chemicals majors in regions such as Southeast Asia – facing the challenge of becoming more niche.
Once employees know what road’s been chosen by their Boards they can get on with the details, including colouring-in the shades of grey, with confidence. Employees will have the confidence to get on with their jobs, providing this is communicated properly, of knowing that their company has chosen the right headline direction.
The Cheshire cat’s “meow”
I had thought about rambling on and on about the “unknowable” details – for example, whether chemicals recycling will ever truly be scalable, what role bio-naphtha will play in the feedstock transformation and whether green hydrogen will succeed and if it succeeds whether it will be a global or regional business (this could depend on geopolitics).
I won’t ramble on here, though, but will instead explore some of these themes in later posts.
Suffice to say here, beware of those who speak with great certainty by claiming they have the answers. Fungible new markets will, I believe, emerge technology and supply-chain solution by solution – the small incremental steps, “the bogged down in detail”, that are impossible to predict right now.
Once you’ve, say, decided to travel down road signposted “niche” don’t even try to estimate the money you are going to make as this is impossible. How can we estimate earnings when we don’t know which are going to be the workable or fungible markets?
A contact recently said: “We shouldn’t even attempt to play in chemicals recycling because we are not an incumbent”. Today’s incumbents are so small in scale that many of the sustainable energy and chemicals sector will, I believe, be open to new entrants who can become winners.
So, you are Alice. You have returned to the tree, having decided where you want to go. You ask the Cheshire cat, me, what route to take. All I will say here is “meow”. For more details, contact john.richardson@icis.com.