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Why don’t they have in house labs for creating all their chemicals? Seems like the investment would pay off.

• shaki-dora 8y ago
  - Those labs would run into the same sort of problem. It’s not like the supplier is contaminating on purpose. In-house would also produce less, making the staff less experienced - Chemicals aren’t created from thin air (although that is one ingredient). You will still have products coming in, only now you are one step closer to, say, raw oil, which has far more natural variation than the refined product you previously bought = the secret to, like, half our wealth is specialization. Doing complicated stuff as a side hustle in-house just isn’t our economy works.
• sevensor 8y ago
  We're not talking about a couple of people in white coats here. It takes a full-on chemical plant to supply enough sulfuric to satisfy a fab, and unless you're going to throw a ton of stuff away, this plant is going to produce a lot of other chemicals that are of no interest to the fab. That's not to say a vertically integrated conglomerate couldn't own both a fab and a chemical plant -- this is the rule rather than the exception in Japan and Korea -- but these are two separate industrial concerns.