Profit Alone Isn’t Enough: How Modern Companies Create Long-Term Value
Session Summary: This session explores how chemical companies are turning sustainability into a competitive advantage by recognizing that circular and low-carbon offerings are increasingly where long-term profit pools will form. The question is no longer whether to invest in sustainability, but when to invest, where to play, how to sequence capital, and how to build a rigorous business case along the way – including how to stay the course when near-term conditions make it tempting to pull back.
Attendees will gain insight into:
Sustainability as Strategy: How leading chemical companies are embedding sustainability into their core portfolio and investment decisions – identifying which sustainable markets, applications, and product categories represent real future profit pools versus costly commitments with no clear path to returns.
The Chemicals Playbook - Circularity and Carbon in Action: Case studies on how companies are building circular economy business models (chemical recycling, post-consumer materials, feedstock diversification) and managing carbon exposure as both a financial risk and a source of competitive differentiation.
Leading Through the Long Game: How executives balance near-term financial realities with longer-term sustainability investments – sequencing capital allocation across time horizons, building the business case, and maintaining investor credibility when returns timelines extend well beyond a typical cycle.
Measuring Real Progress: The frameworks and metrics chemical companies use to track sustainability performance and how to distinguish competitive progress from headline commitments.
Speaker
Maryanne Hauser
Maryanne Hauser is an Associate Partner at Bain & Company and has spent nearly a decade in management consulting advising executives at some of the world's leading chemicals companies. Her work spans commercial excellence, corporate strategy, sustainability, and M&A, and the common thread has always been helping clients drive lasting growth.
On sustainability, she has focused particularly on plastics circularity and biofuels, helping clients build investment theses and strategies and then activating those strategies with commercial teams. On organic growth, she has spent significant time on commercial excellence across the full toolkit – pricing, market segmentation, customer activation, and go-to-market transformation.
Before Bain, Maryanne worked in financial services. She holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA in Economics from Northwestern University and is based in Chicago.