We live in a time in which political interventions are no longer exceptions, but part of daily operations. Framework conditions change faster, decisions have a more immediate impact on supply chains, often without warning. Not occasionally, but permanently. That is the reality in which chemical distribution operates today.
My question is not a political one. It is an operational one.
How resilient are our supply chains really, product by product?
Not at the level of the supplier as an organization, but at the level of the specific product our customers depend on.
Of course, every product has a supplier behind it. But supply security is not created by trust in a company. It is created by understanding how a product is secured geographically, logistically, and from a regulatory perspective.
Two or three suppliers in the same region are not resilience. They are multiple dependencies. If a region is structurally affected, it is not the supplier that fails, but access to the product itself.
Real resilience starts when products are deliberately secured across different regions. And it does not stop at sourcing. If a product is produced exclusively in one region, then identifying alternative products, technical substitutions, and adapted applications also becomes part of our responsibility as distributors.
This leads me to a very concrete question:
Who actually has a product specific overview today that shows, for each individual product, from which world regions it can be alternatively secured and that can be used immediately if needed?
Maybe such overviews exist.
Maybe some companies have implemented them very consistently.
My impression, however, is that these structures are rarely lived operationally. Too often, this knowledge exists implicitly in people’s heads or is scattered across systems, rather than being available as a robust decision basis that can simply be pulled from a drawer when needed.
The reason is uncomfortable, but understandable.
This kind of preparation does not generate short term revenue. It does not improve margins in the current year. At the same time, Europe is facing weak demand and declining margins. In such an environment, consciously investing in redundancy, alternatives, and preparation requires courage.
But this is exactly what separates operational administration from strategic responsibility.
Resilience is not created in an Excel sheet.
It is created through market understanding, technical competence, proximity to suppliers and customers, and decisions that are not always comfortable in the short term.
This is not a call for panic.
It is a call for preparation.
Because in a fragmented world, it is rarely producers or end customers who are affected first.
It is the middle layer. The distribution.
That’s the chemistry.
Siggi.
