ENGINEERING AND PERFORMANCE PLASTICS, 2005-2015, RAPRA, VIENNA 2005

Françoise Pardos, Pardos Marketing, February 2006

Supply of engineering and specialty plastics

The summary Tables 4 to 7 show that, with the exception of nylon, there are relatively few suppliers for each of these polymers. Whilst there are over 300 producers of commodity plastics in the world, engineering and specialty plastics producers are less than 50 altogether.

However, there are more players than there used to be, as many of the original patents ended, opening the way to new entrants. Over the last ten years, the supply of these plastics has been marked by many changes in mergers and acquisitions, entry and disinvestment.

For instance, polysulphones changed hands, from the original Union Carbide, to Amoco, to BP, to Solvay. Solutia sold to Dow, BASF integrated the former nylon 6/6 business of Ticona, as well as the engineering plastics business of Honeywell, formerly Allied. Du Pont acquired the LCP from Eastman. Bayer split into Bayer MaterialScience for PC and PUR, and Lanxess for the other performance plastics. GEP Plastics renamed itself GEAM for Advanced Materials.

Very attractive and promising polymers have been dropped over the years, such as the aliphatic polyketones, bridging the definitions between commodity and engineering, finished by their suppliers, BP and Shell.

There have been many others, in the long history of plastics, some surviving, like the polymethylpentene TPX, the high nitriles, PAN, and, more recently dropped, the SPS, syndiotactic PS, from Dow and Idemitsu, and latest, the COC, cyclo-olefinic copolymers, from Ticona.

Table 4. Production capacity of engineering plastics, in 2005, in thousands of tons

*All types of PA, PA 6 and PA 6.6, about 90 % of total, roughly two thirds PA 6, one third PA 6.6

Table 5. Producers of specialty plastics, in tons

* plus Du Pont, Mitsui and UBE, that produce PI film 

Table 6. Producers of PTFE and PVDF, estimated capacity in tons

Table 7. Producers of other fluoro polymers. Capacity was not estimated

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