From the lobbies of the Budapest Marriott and Interconti hotels, to the official suites, the Opening Reception at the National Gallery high on Gellert hill above the city, and the EPCA Luncheon, the EPCA photographers have captured the event. In an email to delegates on 26 October, the EPCA has sent round the link to the 200+ photos on the EPCA website.
(photos copyright EPCA)
Experience life on the ICIS stand at the K-fair in Dusseldorf, on the first day of the exhibition. Jamie filmed this slice of life video on Wednesday afternoon, as the ICIS team was hard at work.
Day One at K2010 in Dusseldorf. The first morning has been crazy busy with all sorts of people dropping by the ICIS stand in Hall 8a - people with lifelong contact with ICIS, people who've never heard of us, people who kind of think they've heard of us, people who suddenly want to subscribe to us, people who have no intention of ever doing business with us ...
Our photographer Ian has been accompanying the editorial team around the events of the morning.
photos
1 Mr Al-Mady, Vice Chairman and CEO, SABIC
2 SABIC
3 Du Pont
4 Solvay
5 Hall 6
6 ICIS stand Hall 8a
The K fair comes round once every three years, and I've never been before. "You'll hate it," a colleague tells me as I'm leaving the office on Monday. It's huge, it's noisy, you walk miles to find people, and you're on your feet all day.
Nevertheless I'm looking forward to it for three main reasons:
1) It's my first time, and I've never seen a 17-hall exhibition with 3,102 exhibitors before.
2) It's huge and loads of people we know will be there.
3) Tina has booked us a fairytale Romantik hotel in a picturesque village 34 km outside
I've packed my flat shoes and have ignored all the invitations to parties on the hotel ships on the
I see the K2010 organisers, Messe Düsseldorf, are reporting that the number of exhibitors is just 12 down on the 2007 event, and they are expecting over 200,000 visitors.
Click here for Nigel's Insight piece on K2010
The event will be held as always at the Pierre Hotel in New York, on Friday 10 December.
Tickets for the Luncheon are a snip at $250 a head, which the Blog's NECA pals insist barely covers the cost at the Pierre, one of New York's most beautiful hotels.
Patrick Aulbers has set up a new chemical trading venture, Aulbers Chemicals BV, he announced on Wednesday.
The new company is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and will be trading acrylonitrile and vinyl acetate monomer (VAM).
Aulbers was formerly owner/managing director/trader at Joss Chemicals.
David Corthorn has moved to a new position as Senior Manager - Commodity Trading & Risk Management Services at Accenture, based in Sydney, Australia, he announced on Thursday.
Corthorn was previously with RBS Sempra Commodities in London, although the Blog originally came across him at BP.
He has kindly emailed me this link to a PDF which gives more detail on the team and its focus.
An evocative helicopter view of all the ships waiting around Fos-Lavera port while the French refineries are out of action - it's a video from AFP, which my colleague Nel has spotted today.
Click here to play the video.
(photo: Life.com)
David Byrne has taken up the position of Monomer Trading and Logistics Leader for the chemical division of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company from Monday 18 October 2010, the company announced on Friday.
Byrne, who was formerly styrene business manager for Shell Chemicals in Europe, then manager of operations excellence in Houston, will work out of Goodyear's Houston office.
He will be responsible for the company's supply streams - C4, C5 and styrene.
Traders with their new iPads are everywhere. My first sighting of the petchem trader/iPad combo was at APIC in May.
"It's a life changer," another trader tells me this week. Right.
Now that iPhones are commonplace, iPads are still rare enough to have the cool edge.
This video is going round today and picks up on the battle to be cutting edge. Here iPads and iPhones face off in an anthem that spoofs Michael Jackson's "Beat It." I love the line "It doesn't matter, if you can't write ...," but the white socks are painful.
EPCA 2011 will be in
This is fortunate for anyone who missed out on buying a rabbit fur Russian army hat at Checkpoint Charlie last time, and shows that sometimes you do get a second chance at life.
(photo: Souvenier stand at Checkpoint Charlie - Rex)
Some more photos of last week's ICIS-MRC Russian Polymers Summit have arrived this afternoon from Svetlana at MRC in Kharkiv.
1 Speakers from Nizhnekamsk (Yevgeniy Tsyganov, Deputy General Director for Commerical Issues) and Lukoil (Alexander Rappoport, Director for Gas and Power Activities and Sales of Petrochemical and Gas Products)
2 Sergei Yaremenko of MRC
3 Speaker from Sibur (Sergey Merezlyakov, Vice President) and me
The Blog observed some key differences between east European and west European ICIS petchem conferences, while sitting quietly in the audience at last week's ICIS-MRC Russian Polymers Summit in
1 East: Loads of very direct questions from the floor, even complaints and personal digs.
West: A small number of courteous questions couched in legally acceptable language.
2 East: Direct answers from speakers, often admitting fault.
West: Careful diplomatic answers and promises to discuss off-line.
3 East: No texting during presentations.
West: Widespread texting
4 East: Jackets on throughout day.
West: Shirtsleeves.
5 East: Everyone stays in conference room throughout the day, even till the end of the last paper.
West: Diminishing attendance in preference for networking, and mass walkouts during technical papers.
6 East: Moderate attendance at post-conference cocktail party, and low take-up of free drinks.
West: Strong attendance at cocktails, plus industry gate-crashers who wander in because they were "just passing", and a hard core of delegates who stay on past the closing time while the hotel staff are trying to clear up.
Everyone who is anyone in Russian polymers was there. I don't know how our working partners at MRC managed to get such a star line-up of speakers, but it certainly pulled in a crowd.
Speakers from Sibur, Lukoil and Nizhnekamskneftekhim (NKNKh) lined up for the first session of the morning at the ICIS-MRC Russian Polymers Summit. The level of questioning from the audience was extremely robust, and much more direct than we are used to hearing at west European conferences. Each speaker had at least five questions from the floor, and one them had 15 questions, I counted.
Click here for ICIS news articles from the Summit:
Polymer producers in Russia to go ahead with building new plants
Protectionism damaging to Russian polymer industry - SABIC
photos:
1 Yevgeniy Tsyganov, Nizhnekamskneftekhim (standing); Alexander Rappoport, Lukoil; Sergey Merzlyakov, Sibur; chairman, A Karab'ants
2 Sergey Merzlyakov, Sibur
The ICIS-MRC Russian Polymers Summit in
It was also blessed by the presence of our own Linda Naylor - famous in
And of course I was there, announcing the launch of our new joint ICIS-MRC pricing reports on polyethylene and PVC (see press release for all the details.)
In this rare photo of Linda, we see our conference chairman Mr A Karab'ants, commodities reporter on Russia's RBC-TV, as he introduces her presentation.
(Press release link to follow on Monday)
Caroline Murray, senior editor at ICIS, has returned from the GSI PET Day in Florence with this tale to tell ...
I know when I have had a good networking session at EPCA when I am forced to add 'hold belly in for donning of suit' to the to-do list. As if 'maintain appearance of having a beating pulse by day three' and 'ignore severed foot caused by new shoes' isn't enough.
I realise now that leaving for Budapest airport at rush hour to get to my next conference, the GSI PET Day in Florence, takes the pleasure out of kicking my shoes off and reminiscing on another successful EPCA. Instead I hang on for dear life, hovering precariously on the end of the leatherette seat as the kamikaze driver speeds into oncoming traffic to dodge the queues.
In this episode alone I lose a couple of pounds.
My relief at having made it to the airport alive is short-lived however, as heightened security has created the sort of haphazard queues English people balk at. These queues are so long it's like the first day of the January sale, but not in a good way.
Our own Nigel Davis, chemical insight editor at ICIS, is credited as an advisor on BBC4's documentary series, All Our Working Lives, which examines the economic and industrial transformation that
The chemical industry episode from the original series (1984) has been updated, with Nigel's help, with a brand new 30-minute follow-up edition, and went out one evening this week while we were at EPCA.
A lot of the footage is interviews with chemical industry workers from ICI, Shell, Croda, Scott Bader, Brunner Mond and Ineos. They talk about working conditions, but also about the shift from commodity chemicals to pharma and biotech, and competition from
One worker right at the end says that he'd worked at ICI, Huntsman and Sabic, and counted himself lucky that he had always enjoyed going to work.
Hats off to my colleague Paul Ray who hijacked an ICIS news interview with Shell's global vice president of base chemicals, Graham van't Hoff to flog him an ICIS Margin Report.
I overheard his sales pitch while I was finishing up in the ICIS suite at EPCA on Tuesday afternoon before heading off to the airport.
Click here for Paul's article.
I'm grateful to all the "sources close to the company" who gave me my scoop at EPCA on BASF's Styrolution styrenics spin-off plans.
The story was picked up the following day by Bloomberg, and I had a nice email of thanks from Andrew Noel there.
The ICIS team in Budapest for EPCA were astonished to walk into the middle of the "Pearl of the Danube" beauty pageant in the lobby of their conference hotel on Sunday night.
Will Beacham, deputy editor of ICB, took some amazing photos at the President Hotel of the pageant, which had originally been mistaken for an auction by one of the Blog's sales colleagues.
Some of the younger members of the ICIS editorial team joined the Pearl after-party on a boat on the Danube. At least two male reporters were seen pole dancing in the early hours, Will tells me.
Click here for Will's video of the EPCA Opening Cocktail Party on Sunday night.
The ICIS suite in the Marriott hotel at EPCA Budapest, small but perfectly formed, with a spectacular view over the Danube and up the hill to the architectural wonders of Buda, was heaving with people on Monday morning. Vicky took a few photos ...
At last some good photos from our training seminars. Here are some shots from last week's ICIS training courses in Amsterdam, taken by our marketing colleague Taru.
For the full photo spread, see the ICIS training website.
There is a power play in these ridiculously early meetings at conferences.
First, no-one WANTS to do a meeting at 07.30. The important party to the meeting (and the re is always the important player and the less important player) is fully booked so can only offer the B-list company this last slot. The less important party accepts gratefully, because any meeting is better than no meeting with the Very Important Company.
Then there's the macho element of, "I'm SO busy, fully booked from 07.00 till 22.00 every day - 49 meetings."
Here's a tip. Just say NO.
And agreeing to see someone for a drink is not a "meeting."
(photo Heroes Square, Budapest: Rex)
More gossip at the Mitsubishi party at EPCA. The Blog hears that Dawn Flaherty of Gantrade in the UK is moving to Noah's Ark in a logistics role.
We seem to recall that Dawn is an ICIS training alumnus, and hope that the top level petchem training has stood her in good stead in securing her new position.
I hear at the Mitsubishi party at EPCA on Saturday night that aromatics trader Martin Riepl has left Linz-based traders Summit, and that he is now on gardening leave.
Another trader tells me that if Riepl is going to another trader, it has been a well kept secret, because no names have leaked out.
Industry players have been speculating that other traders from Summit in the US and Asia have left at the same time, and that they are planning to set up a new trading house.
"It's hard for a small outfit to get the backing," one trader tells me. Over glasses of champagne at the Mitsubishi party, everyone agrees that the days of the small trader are over.
Singer Boy George was checking in to the Hilton on the Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest on Friday evening, as we passed through the lobby on our pre-EPCA stroll round the city.
The celebrity was clearly ready to turn in for the evening, but patiently signed autographs for a group of waiting fans before being ushered into the lift by his minders.
Intrepid cameraman Stephen B recorded the encounter for the Blog ...
Boy George was in Budapest for a concert on Saturday night.
Seeing a Baader-Meinhof terrorist entering court clutching a PET bottle, in a photo in today's Independent, reminded the Blog that carrying a plastic bottle around all day has one key advantage: protection from malicious poisoning.
No doubt Ms Verena Becker, formerly of the Red Army Faction (which started as the Baader-Meinhof gang), chose to carry her own water into the Stuttgart courtroom for reasons of self-protection rather than concerns about dehydration or tap water contamination.
Still, you'd have thought that an anti-capitalist guerrilla would have thought twice about publicly supporting the multinational mineral water and PET bottle industrial complex.
I like chief sub-editor Lewis's tongue-in-cheek comment on the ICIS internal editorial Yammer this morning:
"I have an issue with the picture caption used for the Americas lead story ("Ronald McDonald at the NYSE.") There are four people in the picture but the caption gives no indication which one is Ronald McDonald. Sloppy."
It is third time lucky for me in Budapest. The first time, I came as a student on the train from Vienna into Iron Curtain Hungary. The second time it was as a young parent with small children, again on the train from Vienna after an EPCA there. Family photos show the children climbing on the railings in Heroes Square, on the funicular, outside St Mathias at the top of the hill.
Bearing in mind what my colleague Julia has repeatedly said about the food in Budapest, after her experiences at a recent phenol conference there, I have come armed with the EPCA restaurant guide and a few recommendations off Trip Advisor.
Meals so far:
A broken Blackberry, rain, our flight delayed by one hour, and a sprained thumb - this is not a good start. But the morning improves markedly when I meet up at the airport with another EPCA traveller who has been drinking for ten hours on the transatlantic flight and generously re-gifts me his freebie blanket from the flight.
It turns out that being at the airport with someone in the party spirit is close to being in the party spirit oneself, and then I get news that a new Blackberry will be joining me in Budapest on Saturday, so things start to brighten up.
We meet Henry W and his charming wife Rachel as we board the flight. He is heading for four days of meetings where everyone will be asking about the new ownership of his company. It will be an improvement on being owned by faceless money men, he says.
The hotel is not entirely as we imagined from the website. Sure it has its helipad, rooftop restaurant, bullet-proof glass and panic room, but a wizened porter shows me to a small dark bedroom which is not big enough to swing a cat in. When I protest, I am upgraded to a larger room with a street scene mural on one wall and mirrored walls and ceiling with disco lighting, much to the entertainment of passing colleagues.
