Anchor customers often are significant valuechain participants, such as large material suppliers, or original equipment manufacturers with a major position in a particular market.
As process manufacturers, chemicals companies are on the upstream side of the overall consumer valuechain, with heavy exposure to raw material pricing and energy costs.
The fundamental model we teach MBAs for thinking about manufacturing is the valuechain, a simple model that describes the value adding steps that take a low valuematerial like iron ore and turn it into a high value product like a Ferrari Testarossa.