Hello reader, I am Sebastian Brenner, co-founder of METYCLE. In this article, I would like to pin down the story of how Rafael Suchan and myself decided to start METYCLE.
I spent 15 years of my career in B2B sales and marketing in the chemical industry. Since I left school in 2002, I studied business management and worked for large chemical multinationals (Bayer, Lanxess, Syngenta) and I loved it. During those years, I met Rafael for the first time. We were neighbours while studying in Singapore.
I sold and marketed industrial chemicals and agro-chemicals all around the world. Most of the time, I would spend two weeks a month somewhere around the world, from Asia, Europe, US to Latin America, working face to face with our local teams and our customers there.
It was Christmas 2017 that Rafael called me. I was expecting the regular ‘Merry Christmas’-call, but this time it was different. Rafael was working for Lanxess at the time and pitched to me the idea of building a B2B online marketplace for the chemical industry. I was immediately on fire. Why would B2B professionals like me fly around the globe to make our business transactions (often in the millions per deal), while I did pretty much all my consumer transactions online? Why did the online B2B model successfully gain traction in Asia already, while the western world was lacking such sales channels? I found out there were a couple of unsuccessful attempts at this in the past, but I was sure, the time is now to do it and to do it right.
I jumped on it, Rafael introduced me to Joerg Hellwig (then CDO at Lanxess) and the Lanxess CEO, Matthias Zachert. And a few weeks later we were ready to start building CheMondis. It was an amazing ride and until mid-2022 CheMondis developed into the leading chemicals B2B marketplace in Europe under my leadership.
Rafael moved on and so did I. Rafael became CEO of Scholz Recycling and introduced me to the incredibly exciting world of scrap metal recycling.
I wasn’t aware that primary metal production accounts for more that 10% of global CO2 emissions:
I wasn’t aware that metals can be infinitely recycled, without a decline in quality, while reducing CO2 emissions by 60–>80%:
At the same time the market is a true global B2B market with the majority of metal production and metal smelting in Asia and particularly China, while the majority of metal collection is happening in the western world. Collection also traditionally is very local and thereby fragmented. So, there is frequent global trade in a fragmented > 600 bi USD market. All of that is happening ‘offline’, via phone, email, WhatsApp etc. There is no international trading platform. Suppliers, buyers, traders, middlemen are incredibly unstructured on how they trade aluminium, copper, steel and other recycling materials.
Again, I was on fire. Rafael would bring his scrap metal experience and footprint in Asia, I would bring my digital platform experience and footprint in Europe and so within a few weeks we were ready to make our first transaction from Europe to Asia.
In the very initial phase, METYCLE acted as a match-maker: we brought buyer and seller together to transact amongst themselves. But we learned quickly that sellers actually would be very happy to not have to deal with the hassles of negotiation, payment flows, exports, logistics to Asia and such. So our business model very quickly adjusted to take this hassle away from sellers. Today, we buy the material in full container loads from a wide range of highest quality suppliers in the west. We then organise the logistics and export of the material to Asia, where the material then gets further processed. This way, we eliminated the hassle for the seller, while the buyer gets access to prime quality material. Also, we have the entire process under our own control, for the negotiation, the material flow and for the logistics flow. And there is a massive opportunity to optimise all of those processes with digital technology.
After our initial pre-seed round, we are now in the position to build a best-in-class tech platform, digitally facilitating the entire trade flow from request to order fulfilment. We are offering benefits already to buyers and sellers and are ramping up our trading activities in Europe and Asia.
Stay tuned for more details and follow us here!
