Orlando, Fla. — LyondellBasell has set a goal of building a profitable circular and low carbon solutions business while also working to improve its customer experience.
Direct customer feedback led the Houston-based company to setting five key areas for its customer focus: product quality, security of supply, price and value, ease of business, and innovation.
LyondellBasell executives Kim Foley and Palmer Giddings updated the company's efforts during NPE2024 in Orlando.
"We're rebranding and redefining our purpose," said Foley, the firm's executive vice president of global olefins and polyolefins. "It's not just cost to value."
Giddings, LyondellBasell's vice president and general manager of polyolefins in the Americas, added that the firm "is reinventing itself relative to the customer."
"We're still cost-focused, but we're leaning in on value," he said.
LyondellBasell has targeted $3 billion in increased normalized earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization by 2027. The firm is exiting the refining business and has closed a PP unit in Italy.
LyondellBasell also is making investments, as it did earlier this year when it acquired a 35 percent stake in Saudi Arabia-based National Petrochemical Industrial Co. for $500 million. LyondellBasell officials said the deal positions their firm to grow and upgrade its PP resin business through access to advantaged feedstocks, plus additional product marketing capacity in a strategic region.
In February 2024, LyondellBasell acquired PreZero US Inc.'s recycling operations in California. The deal included mechanical recycling assets and properties containing rigid plastics recycling processing lines.
LyondellBasell also is leasing the facility where the equipment is located in Jurupa Valley, Calif.
In November 2023, LyondellBasell finalized its investment decision to build the firm's first industrial-scale chemical recycling plant in Wesseling, Germany. The plant will have annual capacity of more than 110 million pounds and is designed to recycle the amount of plastic packaging waste generated by more than 1.2 million Germans per year.
LyondellBasell is a major supplier of polyethylene and polypropylene resins, as well as North America's largest compounder. The firm posted sales of just over $41 billion in 2023.