After the 2008/2009 crisis, production capacity for many chemicals has been drastically reduced, mainly due to decommissioning of older and smaller units.

Despite the picking up of the chemical markets, new production capacity is coming on stream sparingly. Under these critical circumstances Axcentive is taking maximum care that you can run your production as usual. How do we do this?

First of all we cooperate with long term production partners – often for more than 10 years – where we have a preferred or exclusive status. This warrants the best possible supply position. Secondly, for every product in our range we have approved backup facilities in case the standard plant lacks capacity. Finally we have a significant stock of products in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Chicago, USA where we pro-actively increase minimum stock levels as soon as we foresee hick-ups in supply.

Over the last months, availability of sulfonamide products has been limited. This is mainly due to plant maintenance and restructuring of production capacity. Despite the fact that this takes much longer than expected, Axcentive’s customers have been to a large extent supplied as usual. By us operating in this way, the market has hardly noticed the developments taking place at the manufacturing end of the business. In the few cases where a delivery was affected, we came to workable solutions together with our customers.