In the last two decades, several other industries have adopted digitization and witnessed high growth of sales and revenue. The chemical supply and procurement industry has not witnessed any disruptive change in the last two decades, says Dr. Rafi Shaik, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Carbanio.com. 

"The processes involved in buying and selling of chemicals are long and time consuming. For buying a single chemical, any user in the chemical or allied industries has to call a purchase manager and the manager in turn will call multiple sellers who will then visit physically, followed by a trail of emails. Later four or five sellers will send in the quotes and the purchase managers will still find the prices high as they are able to reach all the six lakh manufacturers across India. These manufacturers don’t have a digital presence and hence, their products are not listed anywhere. Therefore, it takes 2-3 months to get chemicals. In a few cases, it even takes 6 months to get the required chemical,” says Dr. Rafi Shaik, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Carbanio.com. 

Dr. Shaik shared his presentation titled, ‘Digitization Trends in the Chemical Industry' at the NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2021 organized by Indian Chemical News on 7-8 October, 2021.

Talking about the solutions offered by his company, Dr. Shaik says, “We have brought all the manufacturers on the same platform. The buyer can compare the chemicals and directly place the order. We have integrated the logistics in a way that within clicks the chemical can be bought and then delivered at the right time. There are 9 million products on our platform.”

“In India, there are 178 chemical clusters and each one of them has thousands of small and large chemical manufacturers. We want to create a digital ecosystem to connect these all. Rather than importing the product, we can make it available here. This can be possible through digital transformation by bringing all of them together on our platform. If we know the right product and manufacturer, we can easily select it online and order easily without having to go through the hassles of conventional means,” added Dr. Shaik.

“Chemical industry is growing and it is a big market. In 2004 when India entered WTO and since then we have imported millions of tonnes of chemicals. It has taken 15 years to make the jump to US $16 billion worth imports. When we import a large number of chemicals, our manufacturers also lose many opportunities. It is good that the government is introducing many schemes like the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme to encourage them,” concludes Dr. Shaik.