The 2016 Global CEO survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) draws an interesting but disjointed conclusion. In the survey, 72% of chemical companies CEOs said there were more opportunities for growth than three years ago. Their optimism is well founded. Changes in technology, regulations and consumer preferences in developed and emerging markets are opening up new prospects for sales and profits. In the chemical industry, digitalization is beginning to allow companies to offer a wider range of new solutions, which may eventually change the industrial ecosystem and the relationship between chemical companies and their customers. Digitalization also helps enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and efficiency.
But that optimism should be tempered: in our ongoing survey of executives around the world, 68% of respondents said they had too many unrelated strategic plans; 65% said they were too focused on the short term; 55% thought their strategy would not succeed; and 57% said they did not even consider how their existing capabilities could implement the new strategy.
This gloomy prospect is particularly troubling in an industry where product commercialization is speeding up and profit margins are under greater pressure; competition from emerging markets is rapidly intensifying; digitization is attracting innovation and R & D spending, with cost efficiency as a priority; The transformation of raw material structure to light raw material and new natural raw material forces enterprises to manage more complex regional supply chain. Considering these difficult conditions, chemical companies should not pursue growth in a random way with fragmented strategies. Instead, they must ask two basic questions: “how can we create value in a way that other people can't?” and “what ability can we do better than others?” together, these questions lead to a bigger question: “in the future, I will be the one who will do better than others.” Who do you want to be? “
These questions put the company's unique capabilities at the center of everything it does. In the best case, these capabilities are a customized combination of processes, tools and systems, technology, knowledge, skills, and organizational structure that competitors cannot easily replicate; therefore, these capabilities should provide a sustained advantage for companies with these capabilities.
Moreover, these capabilities force consistency, which in this context means consistency between a strong value proposition and a unique system of capabilities. All of our studies confirm that companies with a consistent strategy generate stronger financial performance. In a survey of more than 4400 executives by strategy & global, respondents from well-organized companies are three times more likely than others to think their companies are growing faster than the market. They think their company's profit is 2.5 times higher than the industry average.
