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Volume 80, Number 19
CENEAR 80 19 p. 19
ISSN 0009-2347
E-BUSINESS
NEWS UPDATES FOR THE WORLD OF BUSINESS ONLINE
Marketplaces
Omnexus, an online marketplace for products and services in the plastics industry, has added six companies to its plastics-related equipment e-marketplace. The six--Toshiba Machine, JSW Plastics Machinery, Milacron Plastics Technologies, Sumitomo Plastics Machinery, Toyo Makura, and Ube Machinery--join three original equipment companies: Engel, Deman Ergotech, and Van Dorn Demag. In addition, Omnexus has launched a new surPLUS Center that lists excess inventory available from plastics suppliers. Users can search an online catalog to find materials and then buy them offline directly from the sellers. Through the website, suppliers, distributors, brokers, and wholesalers of plastic materials can place their inventory in front of a wider audience of purchasers, Omnexus says. The surPLUS Center likely will compete with spot-trading activities on sites such as ChemConnect.
SourceXL is the new name for ChemXL, which is expanding its scope to target other industries along with chemicals and plastics. The site's business plan is still the same: to provide forward and reverse auctions and request-for-quote and similar activities on a hosted subscription basis. It aims to provide automatprovide automated services for procurement and sales to midsize companies. SourceXL's executives include Vijay Goradia, also founder of chemical trader and distributor Vinmar Group; Rusty Braziel, former chairman of Altra Energy Technologies and founder of trading software company Netrana; Peter De Leeuw, retired CEO of Sterling Chemicals; John Webb, former president of Exxon Chemical Americas; and Hemant Goradia, president of Vinmar. SourceXL started in June 2000 under the name ChemPlastics.com and has since gone through several changes. In January 2001, ChemPlastics opened a now-defunct trading website and, in June 2001, acquired ChemB, an e-commerce site in India. Then, after a change of strategy, ChemXL emerged in September 2001.
ChemConnect has signed subscription agreements with Atofina, BP Chemicals, Dow Chemical, DSM, ICI, and Rohm and Haas for use of its negotiations tools, services, and market information resources. Other subscribers include BASF, DuPont, and GE Plastics. Many of the companies are already investors in ChemConnect, but have signed on to use its spot-market trading center and recently introduced self-service auctions. After years of collecting transaction-based fees, ChemConnect moved last fall to subscription-based pricing for many of its services. Annual subscription fees for unlimited buying and selling range from $1,000 to $100,000, based on a user company's annual revenues. Similarly, charges for network connectivity and back-office services, such as transaction clearing, are on a sliding scale that runs between $50,000 and $500,000 per year. Commodity trading on ChemConnect's exchange floor still involves transaction fees related to both the commodity and volume traded.
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Companies
BASF, among the most active chemical companies in e-business, has disclosed that it has issued more than $1 billion of commercial paper in six weeks through the Internet marketplace cpmarket.com. Commercial paper is generally defined as short-term, unsecured, discounted, and negotiable notes. The marketplace, which links institutional investors with issuers of commercial paper, is designed to simplify the transaction process and reduce costs. BASF, for example, says using the Internet can save it up to $500,000 on amounts of $1 billion. It sells its commercial paper in increments of $250,000.
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Services
CIDX, the Chemical Industry Data eXchange, will release version 3.0 of its Chem eStandards on May 30. CIDX has coordinated an effort, involving more than 60 chemical companies, to develop the standards for use in industry transactions and communications. The freely available standards define more than 47 required business messages and documents. CIDX is working with PIDX, in the petroleum industry, and RAPID, in agrochemicals, to create both industry-specific and common e-business standards. A Japan Chemical Innovation Institute team has reviewed the Chem eStandards and will recommend adoption to Japanese chemical producers. CIDX is trying to create a greater European presence for itself; it's also developing voluntary business process guidelines for producers and launching new implementation tools and a certification program.
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BRAINTEASERS
InnoCentive--which operates a website where researchers can get monetary rewards for solving chemical, and now also biological, problems--has taken several important steps to expand its business. It recently gave out the first awards for problems that required wet chemistry solutions: $25,000 to a retired chemist, $30,000 to a graduate student, and $15,000 to a biotech company. Several smaller awards have already been given for paper chemistry answers. Since its launch in July 2001, InnoCentive has made nine awards worth a combined $88,000; the solved problems can still be seen on the site. Altogether there are more than 40 unsolved challenges--posted by companies seeking solutions to their R&D questions--with rewards of between $2,000 and $100,000. InnoCentive also is pushing harder to drive people to the site. More than 8,000 solvers are already registered. And it is now offering $1,000 rewards to registered members for each new registered solver they refer who submits the best solution to a posted problem. InnoCentive hopes its referral rewards program helps educate the scientific community about its site. "By introducing the referral rewards program, we expect to expand our global network of solvers and attract more solution-seeking companies to our innovative value proposition," InnoCentive's CEO Darren Carroll says. The site was created as an e-business venture of Eli Lilly, and most of the challenges so far have come from the drug producer. But just recently InnoCentive announced that an unidentified Fortune 100 company has joined to seek solutions to its problems.
E-Business is written by Ann Thayer, who can be reached at a_thayer@acs.org.
Chemical & Engineering News
Copyright © 2002 American Chemical Society |
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E-Business Story
E-CONSOLIDATION
Shakeout in trading sites and network hubs brings needed clarity to chemical e-commerce.
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