Held from 30 September through 3 October in Berlin, this year’s EPCA conference focused on "The Chemical Industry and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: People, Planet and Profit in the Digital Age". The speakers included representatives of Clariant, BASF, EY, IBM and other large international companies.

The keynote speaker at this year's event was Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations (2007–2016). The conference gathered 2,850 participants representing the global chemical industry.

The annual meeting featured several business sessions focused on different dimensions of the Forth Industrial Revolution. This year’s theme questioned whether the petrochemical industry would be next in line to transform in the digital age after the media, telecommunications, retail, insurance and financial sectors.

Logistics and supply chain challenges were also on the agenda. Prof. Ann Vereecke, Partner and Faculty Dean of Vlerick Business School, presented preliminary results of the study on "The Impact of Digitisation on the Petrochemical Supply Chain" conducted by her team in cooperation with EPCA, investigating the digital technology “appetite” and digital innovation good practices amongst EPCA’s member companies.

The event was also attended by SIBUR’s team, which held over 160 meetings with key consumers of organic synthesis products and BOPP films, logistics companies, and suppliers of chemical products in just a few days. These meetings summarised preliminary results of the current year’s cooperation, outlined the trends that might influence the petrochemical markets in 2018 and assessed the cooperation potential in terms of products that may be added to SIBUR’s portfolio in the foreseeable future.

SIBUR's clients paid special attention to the ZapSibNeftekhim construction progress and were able to see the site from a bird's eye view using visual reality glasses.

Photo: epca.eu

Marat Avetisov,
CEO of SIBUR International GmbH, commented:

“A conference of EPCA’s scale is an excellent platform to discuss current partnerships and their development prospects with our key clients. A high concentration of meetings in one place makes it possible to run negotiations with a large number of partners. This year SIBUR was represented by a big cross-functional team. The meetings were attended by our experts from the Sales and Marketing, Logistics, Joint Development and Production Support functions, which provided an opportunity to discuss various dimensions of business matters. This practice proved effective and we plan to continue it going forward.”

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