**Introduction**

In the burgeoning bio-based materials sector, startups are emerging like mushrooms after rain, most waving the banner of disruptive technology, attempting to capture market opportunities at breakneck speed. However, Jiangsu Sairuike New Materials Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Sairuike") presents a distinctly different character. This company resembles a long-term strategist from within traditional chemical giants, deeply understanding industrial patterns and moving steadily. Its strategy's core is not merely chemical breakthroughs in laboratories, but a comprehensive cost-reduction philosophy and industrialization methodology derived from the large chemical industry.

Sairuike targets a molecule called the "sleeping giant" - 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA), a bio-based monomer with the potential to fundamentally reshape the trillion-dollar polyester, polyamide, and polyurethane industries. FDCA is highly anticipated because it can synthesize low-carbon bio-based versions of common polymer materials in modern life, with comprehensive performance far exceeding traditional petroleum-based counterparts.

This "giant" has remained dormant due to extremely high mass production difficulties and expensive production costs, deterring countless technology explorers and downstream users. Sairuike's story is not about how fresh the bio-based materials narrative can be told, nor about short-term commercial validation, but about integrating engineering thinking and large-scale production capabilities into every critical node.

In the new materials industry, victory is often determined not by concepts and speed, but by respect for objective industrial laws and patience with cost curves.

**PART 01 Departure: Seeking Optimal Solutions in Certainty**

A startup's DNA is often deeply rooted in its founder's experience and thinking. Sairuike's founder, Guo Neng, worked at BP's US division for nearly a decade, spanning R&D, technology licensing, business strategy, and financial analysis. During his tenure at BP, he was deeply involved in joint R&D with Caltech and UC Berkeley, responsible for developing new aqueous catalytic systems for oxidizing para-xylene (PX) to purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and helped BP's petrochemical business reduce costs and increase efficiency at PTA plants worldwide.

From a first-person perspective, he witnessed how brutally low the success rate is for new technological breakthroughs transitioning from laboratory to industrialization. In the bio-based chemicals field, Guo Neng led large-scale R&D projects producing bio-based ethylene glycol from cellulose. However, he keenly observed a paradox: developing bio-based technology within oil companies, their fate is always closely tied to international oil price fluctuations.

"When crude oil prices fall, oil companies' core business - upstream oil and gas extraction profits are impacted, and green projects requiring long-term investment with uncertain returns are the first to be shelved." This strategic back-and-forth made Guo Neng realize that even with excellent technology on the BP platform, it cannot escape the influence of commodity price cycles.

Rather than waiting for an uncertain future on a giant ship, he decided to captain his own small vessel and forge a completely new route. At the end of 2018, Guo Neng made up his mind to leave BP and return to China full-time to start his business.

What drove this decision was not simply escaping structural constraints within oil giants, but stemmed from his deeper judgment about the industry's future situation, which also formed the logical foundation for Sairuike's establishment. He firmly believes that climate change is real and irreversible, and the low-carbon bio-based track is the major trend of the times.

On one hand, there's the global low-carbon trend and policy drive. China clearly proposed "30-60" dual carbon goals and released the nation's first five-year plan for bioeconomy in May 2022 - the "14th Five-Year Plan for Bioeconomic Development," defining bioeconomy as the "fourth wave" following agriculture, industry, and information economy.

On the other hand, he actually saw market demand. Unlike previous criticized "greenwashing," consumer brands began paying real money for green and low-carbon solutions. Guo Neng mentioned that Coca-Cola absorbed approximately 30-40% of the green premium for bio-based ethylene glycol to promote its PlantBottle™ packaging, while Danone, Nestlé, P&G, PepsiCo and many other global consumer giants announced carbon neutrality timelines and sustainable packaging goals, forming powerful market pull.

When market pull meets policy push, using superior-performance bio-based FDCA to replace and upgrade the massive petroleum-based PTA market becomes particularly important industrially. PTA is a key raw material for producing polyethylene terephthalate (PET). China's capacity in this field is approximately 90 million tons/year, globally leading, but competition is extremely fierce while facing enormous carbon emission and energy security pressures.

In 2018, China's PTA production corresponded to crude oil consumption accounting for about one-quarter of total crude oil imports that year. Under future potential carbon tariff barriers, this export-oriented industry will face severe challenges. FDCA is the ideal answer to this series of problems - it's not just a green version of PTA, but a performance upgrade.

Guo Neng pointed out, "Helping this industry achieve green transformation has important economic, social, and even geopolitical significance, touching on national strategic levels of energy security."

**PART 02 Breaking Through: Mass Production and Cost Are Everything's Core**

As an ideal candidate for replacing and upgrading PTA, FDCA's industrialization path has been difficult precisely because, as Guo Neng said: "Large-scale mass production and cost issues are always the pain points of the FDCA track."

Over a decade ago, industry pioneer Avantium from the Netherlands had already completed validation of FDCA-synthesized bio-based PEF polyester in food and beverage packaging and chemical fiber fields, then consistently worked on solving mass production and cost challenges.

Given this, Sairuike didn't waste time on repetitive application scenario validation, instead investing all resources in mass production and cost reduction. Traditional FDCA production technology routes have persistently high costs, limiting application scenarios to a few high-end fields, never truly shaking PTA's dominant position.

Sairuike's breakthrough approach is challenging costs from the most fundamental chemical route selection. For a long time, the industry's mainstream FDCA production route used fructose as raw material, producing a key intermediate through dehydration reaction - 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), then catalytically oxidizing HMF with air to obtain FDCA.

However, this seemingly mature route harbors a fatal economic defect. Guo Neng and his team had deeply evaluated this route during their BP work and reached a clear conclusion: "Using fructose as raw material would result in very high FDCA costs, impossible to reach commodity chemical levels."

Behind this lie two major technical-economic challenges. First, fructose itself costs more than more basic glucose (5000-6000 yuan/ton processing cost). Second, and more critically, intermediate HMF is extremely unstable. To ensure minimum HMF purity required for subsequent oxidation reactions, production facilities need complex separation and purification systems, which not only increase equipment investment but also greatly increase operating costs, ultimately reflected in FDCA's high cost.

Facing this industry challenge, Sairuike made a "difficult but correct" decision: bypassing the fructose route with extremely crowded intellectual property and fundamental cost challenges, choosing a technically more challenging but commercially more promising completely new path: starting from glucose, via intermediate product glucaric acid (GA), ultimately synthesizing FDCA.

This choice is the core of Sairuike's cost control strategy, while bringing systematic advantages. At the raw material end, it directly uses more abundant, lower-priced glucose as starting material. More importantly, this route is compatible with "non-grain" glucose, meaning raw materials can come from cellulose and hemicellulose in agricultural and forestry waste like straw, corn cobs, bagasse, rice hulls, and cellulose in waste textiles (polycotton), completely escaping the "competing with grain for land" dilemma and laying a solid, sustainable raw material foundation for FDCA's future large-scale application.

From an intellectual property perspective, the traditional fructose route is already dominated by giants with strict patent barriers and high potential litigation risks. Guo Neng stated: "The glucaric acid route, rarely traveled, has few competitors. Once technology breaks through, it can form an insurmountable moat."

This technical route has another ingenious aspect in that intermediate product GA itself brings Sairuike enormous commercial flexibility. GA itself is a high-value platform compound with an independent, hundred-billion-scale broad market. In Sairuike's production line, GA is both the necessary path to FDCA and can be separated, purified, and directly sold as an independent product.

This design gives Sairuike tremendous operational flexibility. Guo Neng compares it to a refinery: "Refineries usually flexibly adjust capacity distribution based on price or profit fluctuations of several major products (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel). Similarly, Sairuike's future factories will flexibly adjust the ratio of these two products based on market demand and prices or profits of glucaric acid and FDCA to maximize profits."

**PART 03 Philosophy: The Cost-Reduction Art of "Big Chemical"**

If choosing a unique technical route is Sairuike's top-level design for cost issues at the strategic level, then permeating its big chemical industry experience and thinking into every capillary from process development to factory operations is its tactical-level "philosophy" for achieving extreme cost reduction.

This philosophy stems from its core team's nearly century of experience at world-class chemical companies like BP, INEOS, UOP, BASF, and Wacker. Guo Neng explains: "Our team has deep appreciation that in the commodity chemicals battlefield with thin profits and brutal competition, any trace of cost waste is intolerable."

The first essence of this philosophy is reflected in an extremely forward-looking engineering design: making FDCA production processes compatible with existing PTA plants. This is not coincidental, but Sairuike team's deliberate deep consideration. Even before the laboratory's 0-to-1 stage was fully broken through, they had already begun planning future industrial production processes combined with PTA process experience.

"The fundamental purpose of doing this is still cost," Guo Neng further explains: "Building a new, world-class chemical facility requires fixed asset investment of tens of billions of yuan. This huge depreciation will heavily burden the final product's cost. Sairuike's technical route and process development enable us and partners to directly acquire PTA plants shut down due to market competition or technological obsolescence and convert them to FDCA production through modification."

This "new wine in old bottles" model is highly realistic. In recent years, China's PTA industry experienced massive capacity expansion, leading to severe industry overcapacity, greatly compressing producer profits. Some smaller, technologically outdated facilities struggled in fierce market competition and were forced to shut down.

This strategy of turning industry "crisis" into self "opportunity" reduces Sairuike's capital threshold for entering commodity chemical markets while providing a practical path for traditional PTA industry's green low-carbon transformation.

Compatibility with PTA plants represents revolutionary compression of fixed asset investment from a macro perspective. At the micro level, Sairuike maximizes big chemical operational cost optimization thinking, behind which lies precise systems engineering.

For example, catalysts as reaction cores have replacement costs as important operational cost components. Sairuike's developed long-life catalysts can extend effective time from 3 months to 2 years. Through ingenious energy integration design, they achieve effective utilization of reaction heat within the plant, maximally reducing dependence on external energy sources, significantly lowering energy costs.

These seemingly minor optimizations accumulate into major advantages - precisely what the big chemical industry relies on to survive fierce competition. Sairuike grafts this art of "squeezing dry" every link from the chemical industry into the emerging bio-based materials field.

**PART 04 Endgame: Being an Ecosystem Enabler**

For a startup with disruptive technology, its commercialization path and long-term vision often determine the ultimate height it can reach. Guo Neng's thinking on this issue clearly recognizes that awakening FDCA, this "sleeping giant," and reshaping the entire polyester industry chain is far beyond what Sairuike alone can accomplish.

In the initial market entry stage, Sairuike adopted an extremely precise and efficient strategy. They didn't try to establish cooperation directly with terminal brand giants like many startups. Guo Neng explains that as a startup with extremely limited manpower and resources, if they needed to interface with every segmented field's terminal brands, they would need to build massive sales and market development teams, greatly consuming core company resources.

Sairuike chose deep cooperation with "innovative packaging solution providers." Such partners already possess certain bargaining power, and their business model's core is providing innovative, high-value-added packaging solutions for terminal brands - they are key leverage points for promoting new technology applications.

This way, Sairuike can not only focus limited resources on their best areas of technical R&D and capacity improvement, achieving "selective action," but also indirectly reach and serve multiple terminal brands through innovative packaging solution providers, maximizing market development efficiency.

This model driven jointly by terminal demand and innovative solutions can most effectively overcome inertia in middle industry chain links, accelerating new material promotion and application. Guo Neng revealed that Sairuike's first 2000-ton pre-sale order was signed with such a company.

Cooperation with innovative partners is Sairuike's first step to market, while their envisioned endgame is completing industry-wide enablement through a "technology licensing" business model. Guo Neng clearly states, "Sairuike's ultimate positioning is not becoming a producer covering everything from upstream raw materials to downstream polyester, but becoming a core monomer producer and technology solution provider for new-generation bio-based materials."

This model's advantages lie in achieving maximum speed and scope for global FDCA capacity improvement, accelerating scale effects realization, further reducing costs, and forming a virtuous cycle. It transforms Sairuike's role from a simple producer to an industry ecosystem builder and leader.

Finally, Guo Neng simply repeated one phrase: "Respect objective industry laws, use slowness for speed." This simple long-termism is the real confidence in industrialization. Ideals never land by themselves - they need to be turned into reality step by step.

When performance dividends and cost dividends overlap at some point in time, material substitution no longer needs grand narratives - it will happen in an almost simple way in consumers' daily "eating, wearing, living, and traveling."