 How would you describe chemicals and petroleum industry? How does it function?

The chemical and petroleum industry, one of the most important industry which delivers
many critical products for corporate organization and retailers as well. This industry basically
covers all the major industries ranging from agriculture to information technology. To
produce these products, this industry requires a huge amount of capital expenditure and
working capital for ongoing operation. There are complex machineries to operate and
complex processes to set up for the efficient operation. Being a very complex processing, this
industry also requires a huge investment in IT and R&D.

The functioning of this industry to

process and refine the raw material (oil and gas deposits in earth’s crust) into intermediate or
end products like, gasoline, chemical, plastic materials etc. Depending upon the area these are
further dicided into sub industries like, commodity chemical, Diversified, Industry, speciality
etc.

 What are 2 primary segments? How would you define them?

The two primary segments are-

Upstream- Companies focused on finding oil and gas reserves and lifting them from earth’s
crust. Example includes- Inex, BP, Shell

Downstream- Companies who run refineries for converting crude oil and natural gas into
fuels, chemicals and other relevant products. Example- BP, Shell, Bharat Petroleum etc

Apart from this there is one more segment:

Downstream-

 What is one current industry trend?