To navigate and mitigate the challenges facing the petrochemicals industry, South Korean chemicals company SK Chemicals, last month announced that it would be focusing on value-added specialty businesses with high entry barriers.

This includes expanding its portfolio of specialty materials such as copolyesters, enhancing its cost competitiveness, growing the global market for circular recycling materials and discovering new applications through customer collaboration.

SK Chemicals president Ahn Jae-Hyun revealed the company’s 2025 management strategy, stating that the company would leverage its “innovative DNA” and “high-value-added” business structure to overcome existing challenges and ensure future growth.

“Despite the unprecedentedly challenging business environment for Korea’s chemical industry in 2024, we achieved meaningful growth by leveraging our unique operational improvement capabilities and a specialty chemicals-focused business portfolio,” said Jae-Hyun.

Additionally, SK Chemicals plans to diversify its product line-up by driving product and technology innovation in high-value materials, while further strengthening its market position. Meanwhile, the functional materials and recycling segments will focus on expanding the customer base and enhancing cost competitiveness.

In line with this strategy, SK Chemicals altered its organisation structure, establishing the Green Materials and Recycling divisions to strengthen specialised capabilities. Further, it created marketing, business development and operations departments for both divisions and added a large team system to enable flexible, project-centred collaboration.

The company maintained a solid performance last year despite the downturn in the chemicals industry, achieving standalone cumulative sales of 934-billion Korean Won (KRW) for the third quarter, marking a 9.2% increase year-on-year. Operating profit also rose 15% year-on-year to reach KRW79.4-billion.

“Through continuous portfolio restructuring, SK Chemicals has proactively established a business structure centred on specialty materials like copolyesters. Leveraging our unique technological strengths, we will further raise the bar in the current specialty fields and rapidly expand into new specialty areas like circular recycling,” he enthused.