The Chemical and Materials Market in 2024: Decarbonization, Digitalization, and the Race for Sustainable Innovation

A Sector Remaking Itself Under Pressure

The global chemical and materials industry is confronting simultaneous transformation on multiple fronts — and the market intelligence implications are profound. Valued at approximately $5.7 trillion globally in 2023, the chemical sector encompasses everything from bulk commodity chemicals and petrochemicals to specialty chemicals, advanced materials, polymers, coatings, adhesives, and high-performance composites. According to data from the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), the sector collectively employs over 15 million people worldwide and contributes directly to virtually every other major industrial sector.

But the chemical and materials industry of 2024 is grappling with a set of structural challenges that are reshaping competitive dynamics and, consequently, the research questions that market intelligence professionals must address. Energy price volatility — acutely felt by European chemical producers following the 2022 energy crisis — sustainability-driven regulatory pressure, the emergence of bio-based and recycled feedstocks, and the rapid evolution of advanced materials for electric vehicles, renewable energy infrastructure, and next-generation semiconductors are all converging to create a period of exceptional strategic uncertainty.

For market researchers serving chemical and materials clients — or conducting competitive intelligence within chemical companies themselves — understanding these dynamics at sufficient depth is essential to generating decision-relevant insights.

Key Market Segments Driving Research Demand

Specialty Chemicals: The High-Value Battleground

Specialty chemicals — including electronic chemicals, performance coatings, specialty polymers, and advanced adhesives — represent the segment generating the most intensive market research activity. The global specialty chemicals market was valued at $625 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.4% through 2030 (Grand View Research). Unlike commodity chemicals, where price is the dominant competitive variable, specialty chemicals compete on technical performance, application expertise, and supply reliability — factors that are far more amenable to differentiated brand strategy and customer experience research.

Companies like Evonik Industries, Clariant, Lanxess, and Ashland Global Holdings have invested substantially in voice-of-customer (VoC) research programs designed to identify unmet application needs in industries such as aerospace composites, biomedical coatings, and semiconductor fabrication chemistries. The technical depth required of researchers engaging with these programs — understanding the language of polymer chemistry, surface science, or electrochemistry at a functional level — represents a significant entry barrier that differentiates specialized research providers in this space.

Battery Materials and the EV Supply Chain

Perhaps no subsegment of the chemical and materials market is attracting more research investment in 2024 than battery materials. The global lithium-ion battery market is projected to reach $135 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 14.4% (Allied Market Research). The upstream chemical inputs — lithium carbonate, cobalt sulfate, nickel sulfate, graphite, and emerging cathode and anode chemistries like lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and silicon-dominant anodes — are subject to intense competitive analysis, supply chain risk assessment, and pricing research.

For market researchers, battery materials present a distinctive methodological challenge: the buyer landscape is concentrated (a relatively small number of cell manufacturers like CATL, LG Energy Solution, Panasonic, and Samsung SDI dominate global demand), highly secretive about their technology roadmaps, and operating on procurement cycles tied to multi-year supply agreements that are rarely disclosed publicly. Effective competitive intelligence in this space requires creative primary research strategies — including expert interviews with former battery industry engineers, systematic analysis of patent filing activity through platforms like Derwent Innovation, and monitoring of regulatory filings and government grant announcements.

Key Insight: The battery materials competitive intelligence landscape is one where secondary data sources are systematically incomplete. Primary research via expert network interviews — using platforms like GLG, Guidepoint, or AlphaSights — is often the only way to access meaningful competitive intelligence on technology adoption and supplier qualification status.

Sustainable Chemistry and the Circular Economy

Sustainability has moved from corporate communications narrative to genuine strategic imperative in the chemical sector. The EU's Green Deal Industrial Plan, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act's advanced manufacturing and clean energy incentives, and growing customer pressure from downstream industries committing to Scope 3 emissions reductions are collectively driving unprecedented investment in green chemistry, bio-based feedstocks, and chemical recycling technologies.

Companies like BASF — which has committed €25 billion in sustainability investments through 2030 — and Dow Chemical, with its Project Delta ambition to decarbonize its asset base, are generating significant market research demand around topics including: customer willingness to pay for bio-attributed or mass-balance certified chemical products, competitive positioning of recycled-content polymers versus virgin equivalents, and the decision criteria of sustainability procurement officers at major chemical buying companies in automotive, packaging, and construction sectors.

Research Methodologies Tailored to Chemical Markets

Expert Network Interviews and Technical KOL Engagement

The chemical industry is a sector where the most valuable market intelligence often resides in the minds of a relatively small number of technical and commercial experts. Application chemists, R&D directors, procurement specialists at major chemical-consuming companies, and independent consultants with deep application area expertise are the key opinion leaders (KOLs) around whom effective qualitative research programs are built.

Recruiting and engaging these experts requires significantly higher honoraria than typical B2B research participants — a qualified battery material scientist or specialty coatings formulation expert commands $300 to $600 per hour for research participation — and requires that research instruments be designed at a technical level that demonstrates genuine domain knowledge on the part of the research team.

Pricing Research in Commodity and Specialty Chemical Markets

Pricing dynamics in chemical markets are uniquely complex. Commodity chemical prices are heavily influenced by energy and feedstock costs, capacity utilization rates, and global trade dynamics, while specialty chemical pricing is far more opaque and driven by value-in-use economics. Effective pricing research in specialty chemicals typically employs:

Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meters adapted for industrial B2B contexts
Economic Value Estimation (EVE) models that quantify the financial value a specialty product creates for the customer relative to alternatives
Conjoint analysis with price as a key attribute alongside performance specifications, technical service support, and supply security
Benchmark studies using price indices from publications like ICIS Chemical Business, Chemical Week, and S&P Global Commodity Insights

Demand Forecasting and Market Sizing

Market sizing in the chemical sector requires careful handling of multiple data layers. Industry-level production and trade data from the United Nations Comtrade Database, the U.S. International Trade Commission, and national statistics offices provides the quantitative foundation. This is typically layered with application-level demand analysis — tracing chemical consumption through industries such as automotive, construction, agriculture, and electronics — and supplemented with primary research to capture private company and non-reported trade flows.

Regulatory Intelligence as a Competitive Advantage

Regulatory change is a primary driver of market disruption in chemicals. The EU's REACH regulation — Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals — has driven the reformulation of thousands of products and the market withdrawal of numerous substances. The anticipated tightening of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance) regulation in both the EU and the U.S. represents the most significant pending regulatory disruption since REACH, with implications for fluoropolymer suppliers, surface treatment chemistry providers, and the dozens of industries that rely on PFAS-containing materials.

Market researchers who develop regulatory tracking competency — systematically monitoring the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) candidate list, EPA regulatory dockets, and state-level chemical regulation initiatives — can provide chemical clients with an early-warning intelligence capability that has direct strategic value.

Actionable Recommendations for Chemical Market Researchers

Invest in developing technical vocabulary fluency in your primary chemical subsegments — the credibility differential between a researcher who understands the difference between thermoset and thermoplastic polymers and one who does not is enormous in client-facing contexts.
Build a systematic regulatory tracking workflow using ECHA, EPA, and state chemical regulation resources as ongoing intelligence inputs, not just point-in-time research inputs.
Leverage patent analytics as a leading indicator of competitive technical activity — chemical patent filings from companies like 3M, Henkel, or PPG Industries often signal commercial direction 3-5 years in advance.
Design buyer journey research that accounts for the multi-stakeholder complexity of chemical procurement: technical evaluation, commercial negotiation, regulatory compliance verification, and supply security assessment are all distinct phases with distinct influencer profiles.

Conclusion

The chemical and materials sector is entering a decade of extraordinary transformation — one that will determine which companies emerge as the material science leaders of the clean energy economy and which are left behind by competitors who moved faster on sustainability, digitalization, and customer-centric innovation. For market researchers, this transformation represents a genuine opportunity to serve as strategic intelligence partners to an industry that urgently needs high-quality market insight to navigate the road ahead.