Sourcing chemicals in Korea: who is actually selling and why the first email so often reaches nobody

Sourcing chemicals in Korea: who is actually selling and why the first email so often reaches nobody.

I am Siggi. I know the chemistry in Asia.

Anyone sending a first enquiry to Korea tends to make the same experience I did. The enquiry does not fail on price, it lands with the wrong company.

A Korean chemical site usually has several faces. The producing company runs the plant and is the one named in trade news. The group’s trading company handles a large share of the exports. Larger groups add a European sales subsidiary or an agent for a given territory. In my experience an email to the producer gets passed on or it sits there without anyone declining.

Then there is the layer that tends to be overlooked. Many Korean producers do not sell to Europe themselves at all. I come across four forms: the group’s own trading company, the independent exporter who resells under its own name, the European distributor with an exclusive agreement and the commercial agent without stock of its own. Once the European representation has been assigned, the producer is usually not allowed to answer directly. It forwards the enquiry, quite often to a house that acts as a distributor in the European market itself, in other words to the competitor of the person asking. Anyone who knows that beforehand writes the first email differently or not at all.

Add the question of ownership. The English trade press writes affiliate, whether it is a subsidiary, an equity method investment or a supplier with a long term contract. Anyone who reads subsidiary into that assumes an authority to give instructions that does not exist and then wonders why pointing to the Japanese parent achieves nothing in the conversation. That happened to me recently.

It can be cleared up in a quarter of an hour. Open the company website in its Korean version, the group structure is usually more complete there. Pull the financial statements from DART, the Korean disclosure system, shareholders and holdings are listed there. Check the page with sales locations, a European address means the territory is taken. Search the product name together with the word distributor, European representatives advertise their exclusivity themselves.

The first question in the conversation is therefore different from China. Through which company would a European buyer purchase and is that territory already assigned. Capacity comes later. It costs nothing and it decides whether the second email reaches anyone at all.

Where it ends: representation agreements are never public. Ownership, on the other hand, is public more often than expected, because DART holds the accounts of listed companies and of unlisted companies subject to audit. With the very small houses the direct question remains. In Korea it gets answered when it is asked in a factual way.

That's the chemistry.
Siggi