Helping you navigate the new normal
Just when you think something really can’t get any worse, it does. Sadly, that’s the story on chemical industry force majeures since my last half-year review. As I noted then: “There is no such thing as an accident. The chemical industry, like others, has known this for over 30 years, since the adoption of Quality […]
Looking down the table below of chemical company’s reports, its hard to be very optimistic about the outlook. The first half of the year disappointed, as I noted in August. Then Q3 saw major volatility as the hedge funds and high frequency traders played their games in the oil market – prices weakened as demand […]
Companies are about to review their Q1 performance, and re-forecast profit and revenue for the rest of the year. Most will be disappointed with results so far, as the long-promised economic recovery has again failed to appear. This will be no surprise to blog readers. But there is another and connected issue for Management Teams to worry […]
We all live in hope. That seems to be the underlying message from the blog’s quarterly survey of company results. Nothing has changed since last quarter or indeed Q2, when BASF noted that “achieving our earnings target is significantly more challenging today than we had expected”. Yet this latest quarter was, of course, supposed to be […]
