One of the most important industries in the world, the chemical industry companies is also directly integral to many other major sectors, which is why its incredible recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic seemingly subsided was great news for everyone, and especially manufacturing concerns. In fact, according to a report by BASF, one of the biggest chemical companies in the world, real change in 2021 vs the prior year was 6.1%, after a decline of 0.1% in 2020, mainly led by the European Union, where chemical production grew by 6%, and Asia, where production grew by a very healthy 7.6%.
The biggest chemical market in the world right now is China, which will continue to see growth of 4% even though demand from consumer goods and electronics industries has weakened. However, this has been somewhat offset by higher demand from the automotive chemical industry companies. While growth in the United States was mostly stable, coming in at 1.8% in 2021 despite a decline of 3.5% in 2020, with growth being defined by higher demand in both specialty and commodity chemicals which has allowed chemical companies to increase their prices through the year. Because of higher demand, many of the biggest chemical companies in the world have stocked up in order to build capacity, while also investing significantly to improve their capital infrastructure in a bid to enter more markets and carry out mergers and acquisitions to deliver further growth as needed.
Despite some positive key performance indicators, it is true that the chemical industry companies, like almost every other chemical industry companies in the world, has been impacted by inflation which reached record levels in most countries. Inflation has resulted in an increase in the costs of goods sold, which in turn has deteriorated margins because of which companies have had to work hard to either reduce costs in other areas or by increasing prices, which in turn hurts demand.
As we mentioned earlier, the demand for specialty and commodity chemicals has resulted in many of the biggest chemical companies transforming their portfolios mainly due to petrochemical expansion in the U.S. Gulf Coast, while digitization is also required for these companies to remain future-proof. According to Deloitte, digital transformation is extremely necessary for to shift the landscape of the chemical industry companies, even though the immediate focus will be to stabilize platforms that already exist in a bid to maximize monetary benefits before expanding further to other areas.  Another area of change for the chemical industry companies is to become more customer centric in order to retain customer loyalty and customer retention. While the Covid-19 pandemic may have accelerated this trend, the chemical industry companies has already been shifting towards being more customer driven now.To determine the biggest chemical companies in the world, we have considered both market cap and trailing twelve month revenue to rank each company with data taken from Yahoo Finance, using that to calculate the company's average ranking. For companies which are not listed, their ranking is based on revenue alone. There are also several major companies which count among the biggest chemical companies in the world, but chemicals only make up a percentage of their total sales. For these companies, we have used either their annual reports and C&EN's data about their chemical revenue only.