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Chemical

Chemical companies, including commodity, specialty, and personal care companies, require innovative risk management and insurance solutions. Marsh’s experience and expertise can help your business overcome challenges and seize opportunities from risk.

Chemical companies operate in a dynamic and ever-evolving environment. From developing advanced technology to meet the demands of a sophisticated and socially-conscious customer, to navigating disruption-prone supply chain networks, these companies face an actively changing risk landscape.

With the adoption of newer technology in critical parts of their business models, chemical companies must place greater focus on cybersecurity to minimise business interruption and financial impacts to their businesses. Chemical companies also need to anticipate and plan for potential risks, including operational hazards, severe weather, product liability, worker injuries, and other disruptive events, and take measures to manage and mitigate them.

Our dedicated Chemical Industry Practice specialists understand the unique risks, threats, and opportunities that matter to you. We combine global experience with local expertise to help you identify, assess, and prioritise the risks facing your chemical business and offer you tailored insurance and risk management solutions so that your business can remain resilient and be successful.

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FAQs

With facilities, suppliers, and end users located in severe weather prone regions around the globe and exposed to many other threats, chemical companies face the following primary areas of risk:

  • Property: Substantial losses within the industry are often attributed to risks such as: physical damage to plants and buildings; business interruption due to fires, explosions, vapor cloud explosions (VCE), machinery breakdowns, and natural catastrophes (hurricanes, wind, storm surge, flood); and supply chain and business continuity disruptions.
  • Liability: These risks include third-party bodily injury and property damage to premises and automobiles. Other relevant risks are product liability/recall, transportation, environmental, and employee safety/occupational injuries.
  • Cybersecurity and criminal activities: Malicious digital attacks or the actions of unknowing employees, contractors, or vendors can lead to information theft and operational disruption. Controls related to both areas of vulnerability, including their consequences such as the accidental release of hazardous materials, are a critical component of chemical industry risk management.

When working with hazardous materials and sensitive data, it’s important to account for all three threats to support a comprehensive approach to risk management. Recognizing and addressing emerging threats will help mitigate the financial, operational, and human impacts related to these adverse events.

Due to the broad range of risk chemical companies are exposed to, companies often deploy a combination of policies and risk transfer strategies to protect assets and minimize potential damages. Some options for addressing their key areas of risk exposure include:

  • Property insurance: This policy provides coverage for property damage and business interruption as a result of natural catastrophes, severe weather events, and other disruptive events.
  • Casualty insurance: This coverage provides protection for workers’ compensation or similar, general/products liability, automobile liability/physical damage, and environmental liability.
  • Cyber risk insurance: This policy covers various costs associated with losses from a cyberattack. The scope of coverage can be broad depending on the policy terms.

Using our data and analytics tools, Marsh will benchmark and quantify the unique risk exposures to which your company is vulnerable. From there, we’ll build a risk management program that can help protect your company against potential threats or damages.

Marsh aims to help you gain insights into your exposures and be able to implement appropriate risk mitigation and transfer strategies.

Our people

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Jenny Yu

Chemical and Life Sciences Industry Practice Leader, Risk Management

  • United Kingdom

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Kevin Burke

Client Executive

  • Ireland