State-owned companies

If the distribution of gas in a country is run by a nationalised or state owned company, there is effectively a monopoly on this service, and prices for gas distributed through a grid system will have to be negotiated with the distribution company. If the market for distribution is not regulated then opportunities arise to sell gas to other customers and... 

This approach requires a cross-company coordination and information exchange platform in order to create transparency and accurate information about material flows in the chain as basis for decisions. In addition, full collaboration and trust rather than the competition between different companies is required. These assumptions are similar to approaches in planned economies with a central planning office trying to optimize complete industries composed by state-owned companies. 

The operator of the upstream network, the state owned company Gassco AS, is awarded certain powers under Section 66 of the PR. The operator s responsibilities include operation of the network, maintenance and maintenance planning, and co-ordination of processes for further development of the network.25 The operator shall also co-ordinate gas quality nominations at inlets and outlets and may under special circumstances even issue binding instructions to operators of production facilities in order to avoid operational disturbances or gas quality problems.26... 

Another contrarian, DSM in the Netherlands, had been a state-owned company before it became privatized, a process that began in 1989 and was completed in 1996. From its past it had inherited positions in fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and such intermediates as melamine and caprolactam as well as polyolefins, with access to basic olefins through its own crackers in Geleen, Netherlands. In 1997 DSM acquired the polyethylene and polypropylene operations of FIuls (VEBA) with the Gelsenkirchen site. The company had also diversified into elastomers, having purchased in the United States the Copolymer Rubber and Chemical Corporation, which contributed to DSM s expansion into the fields of ethylene propylene, styrene butadiene, and nitrile rubbers. DSM is also a supplier of industrial resins and engineering... 

Hungary. The Hungarian petrochemical industry is in the hands of TVK, a state-owned company that is being prepared for privatization. There is also a state-owned oil company, MOL. Hungary is an importer of ethylene via pipeline from Ukraine. TVK and MOL are producers of propylene, and TVK produces polypropylene. Six CPI construction projects were under way in the petroleum, petrochemical, and environmental cleanup areas in early 1999 [13]. 

State-owned companies, the forces of market competition will also drive managers to be more customer oriented. 

Before 1989, drug needs in the CCEE were supplied largely by domestic state-owned companies. These companies also exported their goods to the former Soviet Union. The consumption of medicines was high in volume terms due to inappropriate prescribing habits, a highly specialized and hospital-based health care system, and strong patient pressures. 

After an initial failed attempt to privatize nuclear power with the rest of the British electricity industry in 1990, the government put the nuclear stations into two state-owned companies. Nuclear Electric for the English and Welsh stations, and Scottish Nuclear for the Scottish stations. In 1995 the more modern advanced gas cooled reactor (AGR) stations plus the new pressurized water reactor (PWR) at Sizewell were privatized in the form of a new company, British Energy pic. The older Magnox reactors were retained in a company called Magnox Electric. 

The Finnish chemists of the golden age were very prolific, and their articles were published in the leading German chemistry journals. They were appointed members of various Scandinavian and German academic societies, received honorary doctorates from universities of the same countries and were awarded major scientific prizes. For example, Gustaf Komppa was the first Nordic scholar to receive the silver von Hofmann-medal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker. Nevertheless, the factories founded by them were, as a rule, unsuccessful. Komppa, however, was a co-founder of three sound companies, the pharmaceutical factory Orion, the state-owned powder factory at Vihtavuori, and another state-owned company for the manufacture of superphosphate and sulphuric acid." ... 

The case of German Rail has important implications for the deregulation debate since it has autonomous responsibility for safety. The definition of safety standards and testing for compliance has been the above department s responsibility for decades, and this never gave rise to discussion. What has changed since 1990 is that commercialisation has reached German Rail. Since the government decided to convert the state-owned company into a privately owned joint-stock company, commercial forces have acted on the company in the same way as on all other commercially operated enterprises. 

Ultimately, however, it appears as though the principal land use to which the cutaway bogs will be put will be conventional forestry, which could take up to one-half of the total available area. Over the last 1(X) years, by far the main source of peatland alteration in Ireland has been afforestation, almost entirely driven by state-sponsored measures to increase the country s level of forest cover, which at the time of independence in 1922 was as low as just one per cent of the national land area (Teagasc, 2009). The Irish government s afforestation policy has been mainly effected through a state-owned company similar in format to Bord na Mona, and, while in recent decades the emphasis has shifted to promoting afforestation on privately-owned land, almost two-thirds of Ireland s forests (which now account for over 10% of the total area) are today in state ownership. 

There are more than 12 000 state-owned, local government-owned, private and foreign funded producers of plastics and plastic products in China. The majority of them are small companies, which manufacture plastic products. Large state-owned companies dominate the production and supply of plastics materials, heavily influence plastic product design, and indeed fabricate numerous end-use plastic products. Provincial, local municipal or township governments, private entrepreneurs or foreign funded enterprises own the remainder of the companies. 

China s two major state-owned companies - China Petrochemical Group Corp (Sinopec Beijing www.sinopec.com) and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC Beijing www.cnpc.com.cn) - still dominate the production of feedstock ethylene and many petrochemical intermediates and downstream products, and their combined capacity accounts for more than 90% of the country s total output. However, increasingly, Sinopec and CNPC have been partnering with many of the world s leading chemical companies to build world-class petrochemical complexes. 

A major petrochemical producer in China, the Hubei Zhongtian Group has approximately 10 000 employees. Major products of the company include sulphuric acid, propylene, methanol, PP (annual output of 20 000 tonnes) and PVC. As a large state-owned company, the Hubei Zhongtian Group is permitted to import/export products directly. 

Beijing hoped that its FIE policies and support of private enterprise would help to pick up the unemployed that were sure to follow from the decline of non-competitive state-owned companies. If we can judge by these data, it seems they have met with at least partial success on this score as well. Total private sector and TVE employment in 2003 exceeded employment losses in the state-owned sector by some 30 million, not a trivial number even in China. 

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