Things are gradually beginning to open up. The second wave caused a lot of damage to a lot of industries as it hurt the auto industry the most along with FMCG sales. We all hope that there shouldn’t be a third wave; however precautions need to be taken to prevent another lockdown. A city in the US is almost there to get herd immunity but I always wonder if such a thing like herd immunity exists! Not just the US has the highest vaccination rates in the world, the city of San Francisco has been having the lowest number of cases on a daily basis with 79% of the population received at least one dose according to the San Francisco health department data. It is encouraging news irrespective of whether it is herd immunity or vaccination or a mix of both, there are other cities in the US which have shown positive signs of lower cases. Apart from that the US government and the G7 nations have decided to roll out 1 billion vaccination doses to the world’s poorer countries to fight the pandemic.

Today, I want to highlight an issue or may be an opportunity which can help increase the presence of the Indian chemical industry. For the past few years, we had seen an increase in dominance of manufacturing from China. With complete disregard to environment, things were moving at an extremely fast pace and China had been the lead exporter for most of the companies around the world. With the global financial crisis that happened in 2008, we saw the dominance increased further as most of the companies were not able to come to terms with China’s cheap labour, worst emission standards and high costs of its own manufacturing plants prevented these companies to flourish. However, the things changed recently due to the pandemic and more and more companies stopped importing from China. We saw a major shift of things which has made other countries and companies give priority to local manufacturing and decrease its reliance on China imports.

This is a good thing and local firms have seen a major shift in its consumption from within the country and these manufacturing companies are not just working on economies of scale but also planning to export their surplus products as other countries too wants to decrease their reliance on China. This fact is highly evident in the recent stock prices surges of the chemical companies in India and around the world!

This is true not just for commodity chemicals but also specialized chemicals. Although the difference between the two is not very clear, it is a general understanding that commodity chemicals are high in volume and available or sold in bulk and specialty chemicals are low volume, highly margin products sold to niche segments. Specialty chemicals are based on research and have a potential to generate more revenue and margins than commodity chemicals producers. You can yourself check the difference between the prices of stocks and their revenues in Jan 2020 (before the pandemic) and the prices and revenues now.

As more companies manufacturing has increased, revenue increases and two things have to align with the chemical industry. One is environment and another is safety. We do hope, we follow the global environment standards to prevent any environmental catastrophe and follow safety protocols to prevent lost from fire, hazards and other human induced calamities. We will have more articles related to environmental issues and safety in the chemical industry in the upcoming months.

There is yet another update from our IT and web development team. We have revamped our website and home page to make it more user friednly and intuitive for our visitors. We have one of the highest number of hits on our website since the last 1 year. Our leads platform has gain traction and is one of the leading portal of enquiries for buying and selling in the chemical industry. If you have not registered then go ahead and signup today. You can make your company profile and upload products for free. Charges are only if you get leads or enquiries.

Also, we would like to invite any research companies, acedmic institutions or manufacturing companies to submit an article or research paper which will be beneficial to the chemical industry as a whole. If you are looking to find a specilized person to work in the chemical industry we will help you find one, specially engineers with chemical engineering and PHD's background to come help you in improving the process or development of new and improved products.

Rest assured, if you follow the protocols we all will be fine and the pandemic will be gone before we even know it and things will be back to normal. Thats the hope and good wishes I have for this month.