Bayer, ExxonMobil augment Chinese research presence

Bayer MaterialScience (Leverkusen, Germany) plans a third-quarter start-up for its Color Competence Center in Guangzhou, China. The facility is capable of supplying local processors with color-compound sample lots ranging from 25 kg up to several hundred kilograms. “Guangzhou is a hot spot for the personal computer business and ‘local champion’ small- and medium-sized enterprises will find the center of particular use,” notes Rainer Rettig, senior VP— Asia Pacific, for polycarbonates at Bayer.

The Guangzhou Center also incorporates a Design Center for customer assistance in constructing parts and molds using Moldflow analysis. Key tasks at this center are how to incorporate color and design parts for manufacturing.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil Chemical (Houston, TX) has broken ground on its technology center in Shanghai, China. The new 27,000-m² facility represents an initial investment in the technology center and related equipment of $70 million (as previously reported here). The facility will house laboratories and product-demonstration facilities, providing technical service and a range of application-development capabilities for ExxonMobil’s polymer products and plasticizers. Initial employment will be approximately 200 people, with the facility expected to open in 2010.

Loic Vivier, global VP of ExxonMobil Chemical’s specialty elastomers business, also confirmed the company’s plan to start a 300,000-tonnes/year specialty elastomers facility in Singapore to manufacture Exact plastomers, primarily used to lower the sealing-initiation temperature in polypropylene film and also to provide extra resilience in EVA shoe soles, as well as Vistamaxx metallocene-based propylene elastomers, used in film modification, nonwoven fabrics, rigid-packaging modification, and roofing sheet, among other applications. —stephen.moore@cancom.com