The structure and the optimal technology paths of national chemical industries have been examined in several articles published in the last 15 years. Most of them regard the chemical production system as a network of highly interrelated processes, which are to be simulated or optimized as a whole. It is shown in this paper that the corporate character of the chemical industry can lead to a suboptimal or to a non-optimal structure as far as the overall system is concerned. Furthermore, a model based on multiobjective programming capable of dealing with contrasting corporate goals is proposed and an algorithm for the detection of optimal trade-offs is developed.