Although the commercial operation of the industrial gases industry in China actually took off in the mid-1990s, already decades behind the Western developed markets, the growth of the Chinese industrial gases market has been very impressive since and this market is now ranked the second-largest in the world by value.
One of the most significant changes to the China market is obviously the change from a highly captive supply industry to a highly commercial market, and the emergence of thousands of private industrial gas companies. With this change, these companies have to learn, among all other operations and business skills, how to manage the supply of goods and products to their customers. In the past, we would only call this distribution or later logistics, but modern management has extended this operation to cover information flow and capital flow in addition to product flow, and name it supply chain management.
It will be interesting to see how this modern management concept is applied to the industrial gas business in China, where it is still regarded as a relatively basic and traditional industry.
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