Lanxess appoints new Chairman of the Board of Management

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Matthias Zachert, currently Chief Financial Officer of Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany, will take over as Chairman of the Board of Management of Lanxess AG, German specialty chemicals company, on 1 April, 2014, reported Lanxess on its site.

Until Mr. Zachert joins the company, Lanxess Chief Financial Officer Bernhard Duettmann is performing the responsibilities of the Chairman of the Board of Management.

As MRC informed before, last year, Lanxess developed a new polyester material grade based on polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The new material grade - Pocan TP 555-001 - is excellently suited to manufacturing housings, sockets and other components for light-emitting diodes (LED). What makes the product unique is its excellent light reflection, which hardly declines at all over time, and its high heat stability. Besides, it is reinforced with glass fibers and contains special additives.

Lanxess is a leading specialty chemicals company with sales of EUR9.1 billion in 2012 and roughly 17,500 employees in 31 countries. The company is currently represented at 52 production sites worldwide. The core business of Lanxess is the development, manufacturing and marketing of plastics, rubber, intermediates and specialty chemicals.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Clariant, a world leader in specialty chemicals, has announced a 4% price increase across its Business Line Waxes product portfolio, reported the company on its site.

The price increase is effective April 1, 2014 or as contracts allow.

The adjustment is necessary to recover significant rising costs for energy, labor, and product safety, since the last price increase of the Business Line Waxes in 2011.

"Despite our best efforts to offset rising costs, it has become necessary to implement a price increase to ensure we can continue our strategy of innovation and expansion to support our customers," comments Bernhard Ehrenreich, Vice President and Head of Business Line Waxes.

As MRC wrote previously, last year, Clariant introduced AddWorks, its new brand for polymer additives solutions. It consists of: AddWorks, application oriented solutions specifically designed by segments of the plastics industry AddWorks LXR, a new range of polymer additives designed to provide particular effects in a wide variety of applications. AddWorks are developed by matching the needs of companies engineering technologies for polymerization, polymer producers, compounders, and even converters.

Clariant AG is a Swiss chemical company and a world leader in the production of specialty chemicals for the textile, printing, mining and metallurgical industries. It is engaged in processing crude oil products in pigments, plastics and paints.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- On February 20, 2014, Petrochina Sichuan Petrochemical Co. Ltd. successfully started up its new UNIPOL(R) Polypropylene Process unit in Pengzhou, Sichuan, China, said Reuters.

The Petrochina-Grace UNIPOL team achieved the minimum 72-hour steady-state performance criteria just five days after introducing polypropylene into the system. The 450KTA unit is designed to produce homopolymer, impact copolymer and random copolymer.

Grace acquired the assets of the industry-leading UNIPOL(R) Polypropylene Process Technology on Dec. 2, 2013, a transaction that affirmed Grace's ranking as one of the world's leaders in polypropylene catalysts and licensing. The Grace UNIPOL business includes the advanced UNIPOL UNIPPAC(R) Process Control System, SHAC(R) Catalysts Systems, and 6th Generation non-phthalate CONSISTA(R) Catalysts Systems.

As MRC wrote before, PetroChina in 2012 overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s biggest publicly traded producer of oil. The company announced it pumped 2.4 million barrels a day last year, surpassing Exxon by 100,000 barrels.

PetroChina Company Limited, is a Chinese oil and gas company and is the listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, headquartered in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It is China's biggest oil producer.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Japanese petrochemical producer - Taiyo Vinyl Corp., a subsidiary of Tosoh Group, has shut a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plant for maintenance turnaround, reported Apic-online.

A Polymerupdate source in Japan informed that the plant was shut on March 13, 2014. The plant is likely to remain off-stream for around one month.

Located in Yokkaichi, Japan, the plant has a production capacity of 310,000 mt/year.

As MRC informed previously, Taiyo Vinyl Corp. is in plans to shut its another PVC plant, located in Osaka (Japan) with the capacity of 170,000 mt/year, for maintenance turnaround in July 2014 for a period of about one month.

Taiyo Vinyl Corporation, a subsidiary of Tosoh Group, is one of Japan's largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The plant in Chiba is one of the company's key assests, which supplies 50% of its products to the domestic market. The company also produces PVC at the plants in Yokkaichi and Osaka with the annual capacity of 310,000 and 150,000 tonnes, respectively.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Wacker Chemie AG and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) have resolved the issue of polysilicon exports to China, reported Wacker on its site.

An agreement to this end was signed in Beijing. Wacker, for its part, undertakes not to sell polysilicon produced at its European plants below a specific minimum price in China. MOFCOM, in turn, will refrain from applying anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs on this material. The agreement takes effect on May 1, 2014, and lasts until the end of April 2016.

Appropriate schemes ensure that the Munich-based chemical group can continue to offer its polysilicon at standard market conditions in China in the future. Wacker and MOFCOM have decided not to disclose the contents and details of the agreement.

"I am pleased that existing differences concerning the prices for our polysilicon exports to China have been successfully resolved through dialogue," said Wacker CEO Rudolf Staudigl in an initial statement. "The agreed solution is in the best interests of both Wacker and China’s solar industry. We can continue supplying our high-quality material at competitive prices to our Chinese customers, who need it to produce highly efficient solar modules. This agreement is an excellent example of how conflicting opinions in trade issues can be amicably solved through constructive discussions and negotiations based on trust."

As MRC reported earlier, Wacker Polymers, a division of Wacker Chemie AG, has recently announced an increase in its prices for VINNAPAS vinyl acetate-ethylene (EVA) and VINNOL ethylene-vinyl chloride-based (EVCL) copolymer dispersions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Effective April 1, 2014, Wacker will implement a price increase of up to EUR70 per ton, or as customer contracts allow. This measure has been necessitated by the continued increase in raw-material cost.

Polysilicon, is a material consisting of small silicon crystals. It differs from single-crystal silicon, used for electronics and solar cells, and from amorphous silicon, used for thin film devices and solar cells. Polycrystalline silicon is used in the semiconductor industry, starting from poly rods that are two to three meters in length.

Wacker Polymers is a leading producer of state-of-the-art binders and polymeric additives based on polyvinyl acetate and vinyl acetate copolymers. These take the form of dispersible polymer powders, dispersions, solid resins, and solutions. They are used in construction chemicals, paints, surface coatings, adhesives and nonwovens, and in fiber composites and polymeric materials based on renewable resources. Wacker Polymers has production sites in Germany, China, South Korea and the USA, as well as a global sales network and technology centers in all major regions.
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