BODGAN COMANITA
MarketChemica Inc., Toronto, Canada

The Customer Bond column has been providing for a decade an exchange platform for sales and marketing professionals in the fine and speciality chemicals industry. Born from the necessity to deal with low cost competition and avoid the commodity trap, the Customer Bond column has advocated for a customer centric approach to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in the market.

The free movement of capital, goods and services during the first decade of the century has flattened the world while rendering markets more efficient and exacerbating competition. With access to technology, plant and equipment no longer a barrier, the Asian economies moved swiftly to develop the required human resources to back up early gains. They are now reaping the rewards: projections showed China and India’s economic growth to 2050 twice as big as the top Western economies combined!

Then COVID struck!

The wisdom of thirty years of globalization was brought into question in a short three months. As doctors in New York dawned garbage bags as PPE, the wisdom of concentrating of production in Asia, the lengths of the supply chains an ...