Ask a formulator what they buy from us and they will name a mineral. Ask what they actually need and the answer is different: a price they can put in next year's budget, stock that is certainly there, documentation that survives an audit, and someone who carries the working capital in between. Those are the real products. Most of the industry still gives them away for free inside the margin — and cannot see them well enough to improve them.
In this piece
Three copies of the same order
Europe manufactures with materials it cannot really see. Kaolins, titanium dioxide, functional fillers and speciality additives move between thousands of producers, distributors and plants — and that trade largely runs on email, spreadsheets and systems designed decades ago.
The symptom everyone recognises: the buyer keeps a copy of the order, the distributor keeps a copy, the producer keeps a copy. Every order gets re-keyed. Every certificate gets requested again. Every dispute gets reconstructed by hand from three sets of notes that no longer agree. The knowledge that actually runs the business — which producer can supply which grade from which origin, what regulatory status applies, where a lot physically sits — lives in people's heads and in disconnected files.
That fragmentation has a second cost, quieter than the admin. The layer that allocates strategically important materials generates almost no shared signal: little early warning of supply stress, traceability that stops inside each party's own records, and no view of where demand is genuinely moving. Everybody plans on guesswork, and calls it experience.
What customers are really buying
We have come to think the product is not the powder. Customers want certainty, and they buy it in four forms:
- A price they can commit to a budget, delivered at their gate rather than assembled from three quotes.
- Availability that is a commitment with a number in it, not a reassurance.
- Compliance that holds up when an auditor asks — current, in the right language, traceable to a lot.
- Working capital carried somewhere other than their balance sheet.
Every one of those is a service customers already ask us for informally, and that most distributors absorb silently inside the margin. Naming them changes the conversation. It also imposes a discipline, because each one spends the same cash — sixty-day terms for one customer, consignment stock for another, delivered pricing for a third. Each is a sound decision alone; together they can empty an account in the quarter that looks like your best ever. Selling certainty properly means governing it, not improvising it.
One shared record
The fix is not a better portal. It is that an order should be one record that every party sees their own slice of, instead of three copies that drift apart.
The important word is slice. Shared truth does not mean everybody sees everything: the customer sees status, ETA, documents and invoice; the producer sees their purchase order, milestones and invoice status but not the end customer's identity or price; the carrier sees pickup, contents and drop-off but no commercial terms. One chain, projected by role. That is what makes it possible for parties who compete to sit on the same record at all.
It also has to meet the trade where it already is. Email is the default channel in this industry and will stay the default for years. An order that arrives as an email should become the same structured record as one placed through a screen — same object, same audit trail, no one forced to adopt a new tool before they see any benefit. Start with nothing at all, and add a layer only when the previous one has paid for itself.
The delivered price, built honestly
Most buyers compare ex-works prices because comparing delivered prices is too much work. That is a rational response to a badly presented market, and it quietly costs them money.
There are roughly eleven cost lines between a producer's gate and a plant's gate. Two of them are almost always left out: waiting time at the receiving gate, and the cash tied up between paying the producer and being paid. Price all eleven and you can offer delivered terms with confidence. Ignore two of them and you are running an unhedged position while calling it good service.
We think the future of this trade is comparison on that figure — and that the distributors who can build it line by line, rather than estimate it, will be the ones still standing.
Documents that are right by construction
Compliance today is a checking exercise performed after the fact. It should be a property of the flow.
Concretely, three rules we are working towards. An order cannot ship on an expired document — the safety data sheet attached is the version in force on the day it leaves, in the customer's language. When a producer issues a new version, everyone we have supplied in the previous twelve months is told automatically, rather than by someone remembering to. And a batch is linked at goods receipt to its certificate of analysis and to every order and shipment that took it, so that a recall becomes a lookup instead of a week of detective work.
None of that is glamorous. It is the difference between a supplier who passes your audit and one who becomes your finding.
What it gives back to producers
The producer's complaint about distribution is fair and rarely said out loud: you sell into a channel that cannot tell you anything back. You see a purchase order and nothing else. The trail goes cold at the distributor's desk, and you find out a grade was losing share when the reorder does not come — six months after the decision was taken.
A shared record changes that without anyone losing their position. A producer can see real demand by industry and region instead of inferring it, how far ahead customers are committing, and where a grade is being designed out and what for. They supply documentation once rather than to every distributor separately. And their application knowledge can reach the formulator who is actually choosing, instead of stopping at a sales desk.
Find out you are losing before the order stops. That is worth more to a producer than another quarterly report.
Everyone doing only what they can do
This is the part that matters most to us, because it defines what a distributor is for.
The producer has the product science, the formulation knowledge and the plant. The customer has the demand and the innovation problem. Neither wants to run customs clearance, hold regional stock, chase document versions, finance inventory or answer a technical question in Dutch on a Tuesday afternoon. That bridging work is a real job requiring real capability — local stock, regulatory intelligence, technical knowledge of how materials behave together, and the balance sheet to carry it.
What changes is the basis of the role. Historically distribution earned its keep partly from information asymmetry — knowing things the two ends did not. That is not a defensible position and, frankly, it should not be. The defensible position is being genuinely better at the bridging: faster, more transparent, better documented, better financed. We would rather compete on that.
Where we are taking this
We are investing in exactly this: shared order records instead of three copies, delivered pricing built from real cost lines, compliance enforced in the flow, demand signal shared back to the producers who need it, and financing structures that let a customer hold less inventory than we do.
Longer term, materials that have never had a reference price or a transferable title deserve both. Inventory that can be pledged, forward commitments that are standardised, eventually a genuine benchmark — that is a decade of work, in that order, and it starts with getting the record right.
If you buy or produce mineral and speciality raw materials, we would rather build this with you than announce it at you. Tell us which part of the current process wastes most of your week — that is usually where the next thing we build comes from.
