Chemical Industry

Specialty and performance chemicals

Helping specialty chemical companies build strategies based on their core strengths and translate industry-specific trends into actionable opportunities for growth.


As Western players face increasing pressure from rival producers and local players try to capture a larger share of the global market, specialty chemical companies around the world must find new ways to grow and compete. We help clients achieve functional excellence and create profitable, sustainable, long-term growth in the context of a shifting market landscape. By combining our extensive industry knowledge and experience with our distinctive methodologies and tools, we help specialty chemical companies develop strategies that capitalize on external trends—as well as their own capabilities and strengths. We support clients on corporate and business unit strategies, mergers and acquisitions, growth, R&D and innovation, operations, and marketing and sales.


Examples of our work

We help addressing uneven performance across its business portfolio. By conducting a detailed analysis of each individual business strategy in the context of megatrends, we help the client develop the long-term direction of its overall corporate strategy. We supported the client throughout implementation, including multiple acquisitions, divestitures, and changes to the organizational setup. Ultimately, the company doubled the size of its chemical business, and substantially improved the portfolio’s performance.

We help specialty chemicals company develop a comprehensive growth strategy for one specific customer industry, which had up to that point been scattered across its portfolio. By reviewing the trends and growth opportunities from a customer perspective, we are able to help the client develop a profitable growth strategy that addresses the industry’s core, unmet needs. The strategy will help the client, which had been an opportunistic player in that industry, become a leading supplier.

We conduct a thorough review of the businesses’ positions of power and underlying portfolio momentum, which helped create a clear strategy for reallocation, and produced a roadmap for performance improvement that would improve the company’s competitive position.


Featured capabilities

Our Specialty Chemicals group draws on several proprietary tools and databases. These include:

HJM specialty chemical Plant Design: Devising the best plant design, and chemical equipment capable of withstanding changing in raw material and Product, providing optimized designs and adapting capability to changing markets at low capital investment.

HJM Chemicals Value Pools: This proprietary database captures information about the major growth arenas for specialty chemical companies including size, regional impact, long-term growth forecast, stage of development, and impact of innovation within these markets.