This page is an archive of news and news background stories. Stories are placed here when they expire from the news pages and are filed in date order, most recent on the top. Go to the most recent or browse through the headline links.
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BP quits polystyrene with Nova joint venture November 16, 2004
BP and Nova Chemicals are planning to pool their European polystyrene businesses in a 50:50 joint venture which is a pure asset deal - no cash is involved.
Polystyrene is no longer a core business for BP, which is also planning to dispose of its olefins and derivatives businesses. BP's share of the new company will be included with its olefins assets when BP disposes of them next year, probably through a public flotation. Apart from a retained interest in a Chinese styrenics operation, this will take BP out of the polystyrene market.
This move in polystyrene tidies up further the lower performing end of BP's petrochemicals business which it is anxious to dispose of in order to concentrate on 'advantaged products' such as paraxylene, PTA and acetyls. A couple of weeks ago BP and Solvay agreed to put all their joint venture polyethylene eggs in the same basket - BP's basket - which will make a neater unit for disposal.
Nova, which is in the top four PS producers and is second in EPS worldwide, has for some years been losing money on its polystyrene business and sees the merger as 'the best way for us to effectively address an underperforming segment of our business'.
Assuming there is no redundancy of capacity - and rationalisation 'will be at the forefront of our thinking' - the new company would overtake Dow as the biggest polystyrene producer in Europe. Assets being brought to the merger are:
BP
Nova
PS
EPS
PS
EPS
Wingles (France)
187,000 tonnes
93,000 tonnes
Breda (Netherlands)
95,000 tonnes
90,000 tonnes
Marl (Germany)
188,000 tonnes
79,000 tonnes
Carrington (UK)
180,000 tonnes
*75,000 tonnes
Trelleborg (Sweden)
86,000 tonnes
Berre (France)
60,000 tonnes
Ribécourt (France)
90,000 tonnes
*some of which is idle.
Both companies have expanded their PS businesses through acquisition in the past seven years. Nova acquired its European PS business mainly through the purchase of Huntsman's European PS business in 1998, more than doubling it by buying Shell's polystyrene interests in 2000. In 1998 BP bought the Hüls styrenics business to become one of Europe's largest PS producers.
BP and Nova have had joint venture relationships before, with a cross-licensing agreement in metallocene catalysts for polyethylenes.
An initial annual saving from combining the businesses is expected at $40 million from resource integration. Further savings could come from a rationalisation of the product ranges.
Final agreement on the merger is expected early next year, with operations starting in the first half of the year. The joint venture, which will have its headquarters in Fribourg, Switzerland, will have annual revenues of around $1 billion.
Interplas names the day for 2008...and looks at 2006 and 2007 as well November 16, 2004
Interplas has set its dates for the next exhibition, in 2008. It will be at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham from October 7 - 9. And on the way it is planning two linked events for 2006 and 2007. The organisers say: 'the ideas for 2006 and 2007 are being researched with exhibitors and visitors to determine the level of interest - but we hope to be able to announce dates and a venue for 2006 and 2007 shortly'.
Thai vinyls producer Vinythai, in which Solvay is the biggest shareholder, is to double its capacity for VCM to 400,000 tonnes using Solvay's latest VCM technology. Of the additional VCM capacity, the Company will sell 150,000 tonnes under a long-term contract to a local producer of PVC, APEX Petrochemical Co, which currently imports VCM for its own PVC production. The remaining 50,000 tonnes will be exported or sold domestically.
APEX will also sell 48,000 tonnes of PVC to Vinythai, which will sell it under its own name with the emphasis on exports.
Vaillant plans Hepworths pipes disposal
November 8, 2004
Five years after buying Hepworth plc, Vaillant of Germany may now have an answer to what it proposed to with the company's building products division. Hepworth was bought by Vaillant early in 2001 with the emphasis on the integration of Hepworth's heating equipment brands, including Glowworm, Saunier Duval, AWB and Protherm, into the Vaillant heating business. But it was noted at the time that the heating division represented less than half of Hepworth's turnover and a lot less than half of its staffing, and that Vaillant had not been forthcoming over what it planned to do with the rest of the company.
Now Vaillant is in discussion with pipe major Wavin Group of the Netherlands about a possible takeover. An outcome is expected by the end of the year.
Hepworth Building Products is based in Sheffield with manufacturing and distribution facilities in the UK, Continental Europe and the Far East, employing more than 1,700 people and with sales in 2003 of Eur 226 million. It makes a range of plastic, clay and concrete pipe systems for use in the plumbing and above and below ground drainage sectors. Wavin Group has sales of more than Eur 1 billion, currently operates in 27 countries and employs over 5,000 people.
One of the concerns in a possible takeover will be to maintain clear differentiation between the Wavin and Hepworth brands in relevant markets.
Despite the general malaise interpreted for the worldwide polymer industry, the recent K2004 exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany, beat the levels of visitors and exhibitors at the last show, and conveyed more optimism than expected.
There were 2,914 exhibitors (2001 2,872) and 231,000 trade visitors (2003 228,000), against an expected level of 200,000. According to the organisers, exhibitors reported not only an unexpectedly large number of new contacts, but also a greater readiness to invest - which in many cases over the fair's eight-day run translated into deals sealed.
Half the visitors came from outside Germany, with a higher level of non-European visitors than before. Visitors from Asia rose from 18,000 in 2001 to 24,000, with the largest contingent - 7,100 - coming from the Indian sub-continent. From Europe outside Germany the greatest number of visitors came from the Netherlands (around 11,000) followed by the Belgians, French, Italians, Austrians and Swiss. There were around 3,800 visitors from the UK.
The next K in Düsseldorf will be staged from October 24 to 31, 2007.
RPC buys blow moulding plants from Nampak November 8, 2004
RPC Group has bought Nampak's European non-dairy rigid plastics packaging business - largely the former Plysu blow moulding business which it bought in 1999. Nampak retains the former BlowMocan business, the purchase of which brought it into the UK milk market in 1994 and which it merged in 2000 with Plysu to form Nampak Plastics Europe.
Nampak differentiated its non-dairy businesses - serving the automotive oil, agrochemical and industrial chemical markets - as 'short run' and dairy businesses as 'long run'. The short run businesses, bought by RPC, have sales of around £75 m but were 'barely profitable' according to South Africa's Business Report monitor. RPC is paying £23 million.
The sale covers three plants in the UK - Woburn Sands, Plenmeller and Llantrisant - and four in France, Holland and Belgium. However, the Woburn Sands site is being retained by Nampak and leased for two years to RPC while Nampak negotiates with a developer to sell it for housing. RPC has until October 2006 to transfer the equipment from Woburn Sands to its other factories.
Solvay to dissolve PE joint venture with BP November 8, 2004
Solvay is finally pulling out of the polyethylene joint venture with BP which it joined in 2001 as part of a two-pronged deal in which it also swapped its PP business for BP's engineering plastics business. It is to exercise its option to sell its shares to BP, which will then be in a stronger position to float off its olefins business to cut its dependence on relatively poorly performing petrochemicals.
Solvay says it intends to focus on R & D-intensive activities and on businesses where it has a clear competitive advantage.
Solvay has already capitalised on its 'put' option to sell its shares. In 2001, the same year as the joint venture was created, it set up a subsidiary company with Eur 800 m of finance from several banks to realise a cash value for the options, which it then used to finance its purchase of Ausimont. The actual price being paid by BP has not been revealed but Solvay says 'a substantial part of the proceeds' will be used to redeem all of the preferred shares for Eur 800 million.
The sale becomes effective next year, and BP expects to dispose of its olefins business later in the year. While pulling out of polyethylene, Solvay is expanding its PVC business with the start up of volume production at a compounding plant in Russia. Soligran, the 50/50 vinyl compounds joint venture between Solvay and the Nikos Group in Russia, was founded in 2003, and has been supplying Russian manufacturers with rigid compounds for the production of panels and window profiles as well as soft compounds for shoe making. Now it has moved up to 'industrial scale' production and is planning to add compounds for the cable industry to from January 2005. The maximum capacity of the plant is between 40,000 and 45,000 tonnes.
Ashland buys Dow's vinyl ester business November 8, 2004
Ashland Composite Polymers has bought Dow Chemical's Derakane epoxy vinyl ester resin business for around $92 million. Annual sales of Derakane resins are around $70 million. Dow has sold the business because it felt that to succeed further it would need to broaden its composites market products, and that would mean having to invest in polyester, which it currently does not have - Dow, of course, is prominent in epoxies.
The sale is a technology sale only: no physical assets will transfer to Ashland.
DuPont simplifies fluoroproducts structure November 8, 2004
DuPont is simplifying its fluoroproducts businesses by combining them into a single operation. The new Fluoropolymer Solutions business unit comprises five market-centred businesses - Electronics and Fine Chemicals, Communication Cabling, Consumer, Nafion Chloralkali, and Industrials. The company reasoned: 'This will allow us to exploit synergies more effectively across the five industrial businesses within the new organization, including easier access to new technologies that will ultimately benefit our customers for Teflon fluoroproducts'.
DuPont Fluoropolymer Solutions produces PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), PFA (perfluoroalkoxy), FEP (fluorinated ethylene propylene), ETFE (ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene) and PVF (polivinylfluoride), under the Teflon, Tefzel, Tedlar and Zonyl tradenames.
Deceuninck buys window market lead in Turkey November 8, 2004
Belgium-based PVC compounding and extrusion group Deceuninck has bought Turkish PVC window producer Winsa - part of the Pilsa Plastik Sanayi group - from Sabanci Holding, thereby making its Ege Profil division the Turkish market leader. Turkey is the third largest PVC window market in Europe behind Britain and Germany. Winsa had 2003 sales of $21·5 million and has an extrusion capacity of 10,000 tonnes which, combined with the Ege Profile output, will give the operation a capacity of more than 50,000 tonnes by the end of next year. Deceuninck has plans to add extrusion lines this year and next.
The deal, which does not include buildings and land, is valued at $8 million. Winsa has a modern compounding unit with excess capacity, while Winsa buys its extrusion tools from outside suppliers, which creates synergy opportunities for Ege Profil.
Amcor invests in flexible packaging in Russia November 8, 2004
Amcor Flexibles is building a new company in Novgorod, between Moscow and St Petersburg, with the aim of becoming the leading international converter of flexible packaging in Russia. Investment cost is around Eur 25 million.
The company has bought a 10 hectare greenfield site alongside sister company Amcor Rentsch's carton plant and is due to start production next summer. The first phase includes plans to install two gravure presses, a laminator and three slitters and the site is expected to produce more than 100 million m²/year.
The new company will trade as Amcor Flexibles Novgorod and is expected to employ 150 staff.
More EVOH comes on stream in Europe November 8, 2004
'The largest EVOH plant in the world' has begun production in Antwerp, Belgium. Kuraray subsidiary EVAL Europe has expanded its existing plant to 24,000 tonnes at a cost of Eur 80 million, overtaking the capacity of the 23,000 tonnes Kuraray plant in the USA. The Antwerp plant started production in September 1999 with an annual capacity of 10,000 tonnes and was expanded to 12,000 tonnes in 2001. Total worldwide capacity from Kuraray is now 57,000 tonnes. The US plant is scheduled to add a further 24,000 tonnes capacity by March 2006.
Nippon Gohsei recently opened a 15,000 tonnes EVOH plant at Saltend, near Hull.
EVAL estimates average annual growth rate of demand for EVOH copolymers as 10 per cent over the next decade, with growth centered on Europe, North America and Japan, but with increasing demand from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Bimodal technology is in the catalyst, not the reactor November 8, 2004
A catalyst that enables bimodal HDPE to be produced in a single reactor, reducing the hardware cost of having to use multiple reactors, has been developed by Univation Technologies. In addition to the estimated 40 per cent savings from using a single reactor, Univation says it has broken the capacity barrier, enabling a single Unipol line to use the new Prodigy catalyst on lines above 450,000 tpa. The Prodigy catalyst enables producers to switch in and out of bimodal production using the same reactor.
Univation estimates that nearly half the growth in PE between 2000 and 2010 will be in HDPE, and more than 60 per cent of that growth will be met by bimodal products. Film is anticipated to be the largest bimodal HDPE growth segment.
Horners Award for eggsellence November 8, 2004
The Horners Award for excellence in plastics design and processing has been won by a chicken house. The award has gone to Omlet for its rotationally moulded polyethylene EGLU, designed to enable domestic house owners to rear chickens in their own gardens whether in a rural or urban environment.
Polyethylene is more suitable than the traditional material for chicken houses (wood) because the smooth surface can be cleaned effectively, it requires no maintenance or chemical preservatives and can be recycled at the end of its life. In addition, the hollow walls add thermal insulation to the construction.
The Highly Commended award was won by Linpac Materials Handling for the latest addition to its Maxi-Pac range of returnable transit equipment, which increases the handling efficiency of bulk distribution and the display of fresh produce.
Phoenix to rise from Mexico's petrochemicals industry November 8, 2004
Mexican state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos - Pemex - is planning to reverse years of neglect in the country's petrochemicals industry with its Project Phoenix, adding ethylene capacity and polymerisation facilities between 2005 and 2009. Pemex's total petrochemical output in 1994 was 19·1 million tonnes. This fell to 10·3 million tonnes in 2003, and ethylene production has fallen below 1 million tonnes a year.
Since 2001 the company has carried out five projects to raise ethylene capacity at its Morelos and La Cangrejara sites from 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes/year and is now planning to push Morelos capacity up to 900,000 tonnes.
Between 2005 and 2009 it plans to build a 300,000 tonnes PE plant at Morelos, and other projects include capacity increases in styrene and paraxylene.
To achieve this growth Pemex has brought in Nova Chemicals as a partner alongside Grupo Idesa of Mexico and Indelpro, a joint venture between Basell and Mexico's Alfa. A Mexican complex will benefit from access to low cost feedstocks, a strong and growing domestic polyethylene market, and broad market access through the North American Free Trade Agreement and potentially the Mercosur trade agreement. Nova Chemicals was selected to participate in the joint-venture study because of its success in the design, construction and operation of 'advantaged assets' in Canada, and its proprietary catalyst and Sclairtech polyethylene technology.
Investment levels are reckoned at $1·9 billion for the ethylene and polyethylene complex, and $800 million in a subsequent phase for a 1 million tonnes aromatics plant.
Cast nylon makes prototypes faster for Ford November 8, 2004
Ford is expecting to improve its prototyping facilities with the purchase of an MCP vacuum casting machine for nylon. The machine has been installed at the company's European rapid prototyping centre at Dunton as a cost effective alternative to injection moulding short runs of nylon prototypes using aluminium tooling.
The nylon casting module on the 5/04 Vacuum Caster enables heat and ultrasonically weldable nylon parts to be produced in a matter of days, enabling the production of multi-part assemblies in the prototyping or pre-production stage without the need for fixings. Unlike systems which produce porous nylon prototypes, MCP's nylon casting system produces fully dense parts in nylon 6 in cycle times of as little as six minutes.
Austrian recycling plant focuses on WEEE scrap November 8, 2004
An American company has joined forces with an Austrian company to build a plastics recycling plant in Austria with a capacity of 40,000 tonnes a year from equipment reclaimed under the European WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronics Equipment) recycling legislation. MBA Polymers of the USA and Mueller-Guttenbrunn of Austria have set up MBA Polymers Austria - Kunststoffverarbeitung. MBA is also involved in a similar joint venture with Guangzhou Iron and Steel Enterprises in China. MBA brings the recycling technology to the JV, while MG is the largest metal recycling company in Austria.
The new plant will be built next to Mueller-Guttenbrunn's Metran metal recycling operation which was improved 20 years ago to recover a higher proportion of metals from consumer scrap, and the addition of the plastics plant is seen as continuing this process of recovering more from waste. Some of the feedstock for the new plant will come from the Metran plant.
Car component suppliers combined November 8, 2004
The European operation of American automotive supplier Findlay Industries has been merged with the Polytec Group of Austria. Findlay Europe was bought earlier this year by Swiss private equity company CapVis which also has a majority stake in Polytec. It has four plants in Germany, one in Poland, one in Spain, and one in Britain which are now part of the Polytec Interior division. Integrated with the existing Polytec High Volume division companies the group now stands at 14 companies in 12 locations. One of the strengths of Findlay Europe has been its production of components reinforced with natural fibres.
The aim of bringing the two companies together is to capitalise on synergies in the manufacture of automotive interior components. As Findlay Europe the group sold passenger car interior systems, such as door trims, roof lining or luggage compartment trim to the tune of around Eur 240 million in 2003.
Solvay VCM technology licensed in China November 8, 2004
Solvay vinyl chloride monomer technology is to be used by Singpu Chemical Industries of China to build a 200,000 tonnes plant due on-line in the first half of 2006.
The Chinese market for vinyl polymers has grown by an average of 15 per cent over the past five years and is expected to reach a total volume of some 7 million tonnes of PVC in 2004 - almost a quarter of the world market. This growth has been met, for the most part, by increased imports. Solvay says that as demand is set to continue rising, China is expected to curb its current deficit through a significant number of capacity expansion plans in its domestic vinyl production chain.
PVC compounders united November 8, 2004
Belgium-based PVC producer Tessenderlo has re-grouped the operations of its Thermoplastiques Cousin-Tessier, Saplast, and TCT-Polska subsidiaries into a new compounding business unit called CTS (Compound Technology Services), which has a capacity of 110,000 tonnes of PVC compounds and TPEs.
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While pulling out of polyethylene, Solvay is expanding its PVC business with the start up of volume production at a compounding plant in Russia. Soligran, the 50/50 vinyl compounds joint venture between Solvay and the Nikos Group in Russia, was founded in 2003, and has been supplying Russian manufacturers with rigid compounds for the production of panels and window profiles as well as soft compounds for shoe making. Now it has moved up to 'industrial scale' production and is planning to add compounds for the cable industry to from January 2005. The maximum capacity of the plant is between 40,000 and 45,000 tonnes.