. Mitsui and Teijin tired of fighting for low margins in Japan and merged their PET businesses. Indorama, based in Thailand, in late 2010 acquired Invista's PET assets in North America, Eastman's in Europe in 2007, and also is established in Eastern Europe. Those purchases made it the world's largest PET supplier but now the new kid on the block, Octal, says it has the financial backing to claim that title by 2012.

Octal wasn't even in existence until 2006 but the company's revenues might well exceed $1 billion this year and its management predicts sales of $1.5 billion in 2012. Last month the company, headquartered in Oman, announced it had secured $296 million in funds to support its planned next phase of expansion. The senior term loan facility was secured from six banks: Bank Muscat, Bank Dhofar, National Bank of Oman, Bank Sohar, Ahli Bank and Qatar National Bank.

The privately owned supplier opened a 400,000-tonne/yr plant in 2009 to supply PET for sheet. The new funds will be used to add an additional 527,000 tonnes/yr of capacity. Once commissioned in June 2012, this new line will make Octal the world's largest producer of PET on one site and the largest PET manufacturer in the world, it says.

Octal's plants are positioned near a modern port which the supplier's officials say makes it well positioned to serve growing PET markets in India and China as well as more established ones in Europe and North America. Octal has offices in the U.K., Germany, China, Oman and the United States.

Nicholas Barakat, managing director of Octal, says the company already is the world's largest producer of PET sheet, The company doubled its earnings in 2010 and expects to do so again this year, he added. Octal has patented a technology it calls DPET (Direct-to-PET) in which the melt from its PET reactors is fed straight into a sheet die. The melt never runs through an extruder screw, so there is no heat history added to the material. Taking extrusion out of the processing equation makes for sheet with improved optical and mechanical properties, claims Octal, and also reduces the total amount of energy typically required for sheet extrusion. Because of the material's low crystallinity, thermoformers can lower their processing temperatures by about 5°C when processing the sheet. —MPW Staff