Many companies like to make a big display of their virtues, trumpeting every minor accomplishment with a press release. But for Ascend Performance Materials, doing what’s right for its employees and for the company’s overall financial health is more important than getting the credit.
Last year, for example, Ascend’s senior management took a pay cut to help the company ride out the pandemic and recession without having to lay off any workers.
Ascend CEO Phil McDivitt said the company didn’t announce the executive pay cut because management didn’t want to make a big deal of the decision. It reflects the company’s philosophy of striving for excellence while remaining low-key.
“That’s part of being responsible for this family of people we have working at Ascend,” he said.
Ascend, which manufactures specialty chemicals and plastics, “is potentially one of the largest companies that you come in contact with every day that you may never have heard of,” McDivitt said.
The company has been around for 70 years, and during that time, it has undergone many transformations and name changes. At one time owned by chemical industry giant Monsanto, Ascend became part of Solutia, Inc., which was divested by Monsanto in in 1997. Ascend became a private company and adopted its name in 2009 when it was acquired from Solutia by the investment firm SK Capital Partners.
Ascend has a global reach, with about 2,600 employees worldwide, and about a third of those employees in the Houston area. About 600 to 700 work at the company’s Chocolate Bayou factory in Alvin, where it produces basic plastics that go into a wide variety of industrial and consumer products, and approximately another 120 at the downtown Houston headquarters.
The company produces materials used in about half of the airbags for cars on the road today. As the auto industry evolves, Ascend is working to keep up with its customers’ changing demand. The company is producing lighter-weight materials to help improve vehicles’ fuel efficiency as well as producing the basic materials that are in demand for the growing electric vehicle market.
Last year, the pandemic hit the company hard, with revenues dropping by about 20 percent from 2019. But now, Ascend is bouncing back. McDivitt said he expects to 2021 sales to rise 20 percent above the pre-pandemic levels.
“We’re seeing a big rebound and a big recovery in our business as the economy on a global basis has reopened,” he said.
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