Interview with Aleksander Kurszewski, Area Manager in Polykemi AB.
The last year has certainly been a time for Polykemi to finalize a number of important investments. You have opened a production facility in North Carolina, as well as a second one in Chongqing, China. On top of this, your subsidiary in Mexico was established this year. Please tell us a little more about these investments.
Yes, the Gastonia plant together with establishing a new Polykemi subsidiary in Mexico is our step toward achieving our global goals by providing the North and South American markets with our materials. These investments have brought us closer to our customers, and gives both us and our customers greater confidence in increased collaboration. We have seen a major increase in material requests and greater interest in our products, especially those containing high-quality recycled raw materials, so this step was obvious, both in terms of timing and location.
As for our Chinese market, the construction of our second production unit in China, in Chongqing, is also a part of the company's development plan. Since entering the Chinese market in 2005, since we launched our first factory in the country, in Kunshan, Polykemi has maintained continuous and stable growth and profitability, and the sales business in Chongqing area itself has been very successful for us from the very beginning. So, the localization of this new investment was chosen by our customers, we can say. Now, we can provide customers the same material on three continents, but locally produced, in order to save time and cost.
Our facilities in China are responsible for the production and sales of customer adapted thermoplastic compounds also to other countries in SEA, as well as to Australia and India. Our facility in North Carolina is providing our solutions to the NAFTA area and our main office and production site in Ystad (Sweden) serves customers on the European market. We proudly call ourselves "A local producer and a global supplier".
This automatically raises another question: will 2024 also be such an intensive year for the development of your business in terms of foreign expansion?
We have a motto in the Group that has guided us since the beginning of our existence: "When you stop being better, you stop being good". So yes, we are constantly investing in the company and human resources. We will not expand with e.g. new factories or the like in 2024, but of course we are investing in human resources and in further developing of our factories, etc.
It is no secret that sustainability is an extremely important topic for Polykemi, as a manufacturer of polymer materials. What activities related to this topic have you undertaken recently and have you achieved any major successes in this field? What are your plans for the future in terms of putting sustainability into practice?
Honestly, we have been "putting sustainability into practice" since the very beginning of Polykemi in 1968. In the early 1980s, our sister company Rondo was founded in Sweden and since then they have been offering our clients solutions with environmental benefits based on high quality recycled compounds. The difference is that before, we had to persuade, now everyone wants it! This really makes my job as Area Manager Poland much easier (laughs).
What we have done recently are two things… First, the implementation of our Materialsmart.info program. So, we not only offer materials that reduce the climate impact of the client's product, but we can calculate this impact in the form of CO2- e/kg. We can not only certify these numbers, but also help our customers to choose the right material and compare the impact of different solutions, because the choice of material is responsible for 80% of the climatic impact of the finished product.
Second, was to get the ISCC Plus certification. The certification guarantees total traceability in the production and delivery of bio-circular mass balance certified plastic raw materials. Technically, we have been able to offer this type of both bio-based and bio-circular materials before, but now with certificates specifying how much biomaterial our supplier used in their process, and how much we then used in our materials, we can provide the customer with a traceable, accurate receipt of the content.
