Madeleine Jacobs
Editor-in-chief

Facts & Figures for the Chemical Industry, this week's cover story, is one of the most eagerly awaited annual features from Chemical & Engineering News. That's because no other magazine--indeed, probably no other single report--gives such a complete accounting of the global chemical industry, thereby enabling our readers to compare operations at many different companies around the world.

The Facts & Figures team--led once again by Senior Correspondent William Storck--included Assistant Managing Editor for Business Michael McCoy, Senior Correspondent Marc Reisch, and Assistant Editor Alex Tullo in our Edison, N.J., office; Senior Correspondent Patricia L. Short in London; Houston Bureau Head Ann Thayer; and Asia-Pacific Bureau Head Jean-François Tremblay in Hong Kong. They always face a daunting task, but it was especially challenging this year because, in an irony of our Information Age, information is becoming more and more difficult to obtain.

National governments, led by the U.S., are the chief culprits. For example, because of budget constraints, the U.S. government has stopped gathering important data in some key chemical areas--capital spending, spending on pollution control equipment, and rubber production, to name a few. In a serious blow to the industry, the much-used Synthetic Organic Chemicals (SOC) reports died in 1996 when the International Trade Commission shut down its operations for collecting and reporting production data on this important class of chemicals.

In addition, Facts & Figures is missing data on industrial gases because the government no longer gathers this information. This is odd since oxygen and nitrogen are among the top five U.S. chemical products, and they are essential to many industries.

The U.S. government is not alone in failing to gather much-needed information. Various European government agencies failed to provide CEFIC (European Chemical Industry Council) with data for 2000. Thus, C&EN is unable to list the top 25 countries in chemical production and trade, and the graph shown on this page does not appear in this year's Facts & Figures because we don't have the data.

On the other hand, C&EN's data for Japanese companies are more meaningful than they were in the past, because we are now using the consolidated financial statements that Japanese firms must produce in a timely fashion. Consolidated results reflect the financial performance of the firms' subsidiaries in Japan and abroad, rather than the parent companies.

Facts & Figures is still the most complete statistical survey of the chemical industry, with an additional virtue that many sections present data over a decade. This allows the reader to pick out trends that otherwise might not be obvious. For example, R&D spending for 17 chemical companies tracked by C&EN continued to rise in 2000 but fell as a percentage of sales.

Nonetheless, the increasing difficulty in obtaining timely data is worrisome. Storck explained why in a 1996 C&EN Business Insights column about the discontinuation of the SOC reports. He wrote: "Chemical producers cannot operate in the dark. Production information is vital to any industry. ... In the short term, this information provides a benchmark for a company's production and pricing decisions, for employment and--viewed against other data such as shipments--for inventory decisions. Longer term, it is needed by planners looking at future capacity needs, possible overcapacity, and plant shutdowns as well as for export and import decisions."

Countries concerned about maintaining industrial competitiveness should redouble their efforts to obtain and publish data in a timely fashion. The world's chemical firms and trade associations should unite in urging their governments to do so. If they fail to do so, we may soon have to rename our era the Missing Information Age.

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