How industrial chemicals are actually bought in South Africa
Technical approval first, commercial terms second, and both can stall
A South African industrial buyer runs a process. The laboratory evaluates a sample, production runs a plant trial, and only then does purchasing begin a serious conversation about price and terms. Two separate things can stall that sequence: a trial that produced a result nobody communicated, and a credit application that sits half completed while everyone assumes somebody else is chasing it. Both are invisible in a spreadsheet, and both cost orders that were technically already won.
Buying is concentrated in a few industrial corridors
Most of the volume sits in the Gauteng industrial belt, the corridor south of Durban and around the Western Cape. That concentration makes visit planning valuable, because a well planned day covers several plants, and it makes regional pipeline reporting more useful than a national number that hides where the growth actually is.