Which of the sectors Pochteca distributes chemicals to in Mexico have shown the strongest demand in the last 12 months?

Most of the segments we serve grew during the year, especially those involved in export related industries driven by healthy growth in the US as well as food, home, and personal care. Our one-stop-shop value proposition to the more than 40 segments that we sell to and our product, client and geographic diversification strategy resulted in a strong year despite Covid and supply chain issues related to shipping and production bottlenecks in Asia and other parts of the world.

How is Pochteca implementing digitalization into its processes, and to what extent could this help mitigate supply chain and logistics bottlenecks in the future?

We are implementing a dual digital transformation strategy: optimizing current operations on the one hand and generating a new customer, employee and supplier experience on the other. This involves virtually all aspects of our business, from supplier portals and information exchange systems to customer facing applications, ecommerce tools and demand planning software. Digital transformation is a never-ending journey where continuous improvement is key. As we implement more intelligent and automatic sales and operations planning tools, our ability to forecast demand and plan inventory accordingly will allow us to continue satisfying customer needs with a high fill rate. Our IT ecosystem also includes important tools, robots and software that allow us to process data, automate processes and lower operating costs. All this results in a lower cost to serve for our suppliers and a lower total cost of ownership for our clients.

There are many chemical distributors active in Mexico. Why do you think the distribution model suits the country well, and what benefits would consolidation bring the market?

Chemical distributors are important to the supply chain as we can demonstrate our ability to drive growth and competitiveness, offer value-added services, easily gather market insights, and reduce complexity for manufacturers and customers throughout the value chain.

Chemical distributors deliver value by identifying market opportunities, penetrating new segments, gaining new customers, reaching new geographical regions and taking advantage of the trends that otherwise, manufacturers should have to search or learn by themselves.

Mexico’s geography with more than 4,000 kilometers from north to south, hundreds of small and medium cities that host thousands of companies involved in manufacturing, food processing, household and personal care, coatings, mining, and other chemical consuming industries, would be extremely costly to serve directly by manufacturers. Cultural differences and local idiosyncrasies would also be difficult to understand. These are some of the reasons why Mexico has hundreds of chemical distributors that provide local warehousing and services. However, as our industry becomes more competitive, regulatory requirements raise the bar, digitalization becomes key and economies of scale determine a distributor’s ability to survive and thrive, we can expect the industry to consolidate. Consolidation will reduce complexity for suppliers as they will be dealing with a lower number of more competitive distributors which in turn will be able to deliver standardized and more efficient services to customers.

To what extent could public/private partnerships improve the raw material situation in Mexico, and where would investment be most useful?

Mexico has an important shortage of competitive raw materials, including ethane, propylene, ethylene oxide, ammonia and others. Pemex could benefit significantly by allowing private industry to invest or co-invest in upgrading and maintaining existing plants and investing in new ones.  ANIQ has offered economic and technical support to the Secretaría de Energía, the Secretaría de Economía and Pemex in order to improve supply conditions of these basic chemicals which would result in a more competitive chemical industry, generating more jobs and reducing the large trade deficit that we currently have.

Joint investments in port and logistics infrastructure would also eliminate bottlenecks and reduce costs along the supply chain. We need a strong and competitive Pemex so that our industry is able to compete in today´s open borders economy.

Can you elaborate on Pochteca’s latest sustainability-focused initiatives that contribute to a circular economy?

We are working on internal and customer facing initiatives. On the internal front, we are reducing emissions of our fleet by using better routing systems, constantly modernizing our trucks and trailers, reducing energy use in our facilities with LED, increased natural lighting and solar panels and reducing packaging waste by using sturdier drums, IBC´s and pales that can be used several times.

On the customer facing initiatives, we continue to increase our solvent recovery capacity by which we recycle and remanufacture solvent blends and recycle pure solvents to be used again in various supply chains. 

Our environmental services division continues to grow, offering customers waste co-processing, total waste management, zero waste to landfill programs and responsible disposal of dangerous products. With these services we are contributing to the overall reduction of waste and emissions in our industry.