Shipping volume for carbon black in June was 49,414 tons in June according to the Japanese Carbon Black Association. That was down 3 percent over the previous year and marked the seventh straight month of year-on-year declines. Carbon black for rubber products saw shipments down by 6 percent year on year for tires, while that for other general rubber products...
Zeon Corp. (TYO:4205) and Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd. (TYO:4005) have reached a basic agreement to begin looking into the consolidation of the two companies’ solution styrene butadiene rubber (S-SBR) businesses. Zeon and Sumitomo Chemical will, by the end of September, complete due diligence and studies pertaining to the nature of the business consolidation. Any definitive agreements stemming from this would...
Business performance for JSR Corp. (TYO:4185) suffered somewhat over the first quarter of the 2016 fiscal year. The large synthetic-rubber manufacturer announced on July 25 that sales for April–June saw a year-on-year drop of 7 percent, falling to 88.786 billion yen ($878.535 million); operating profit fell 24 percent, down to 5.637 billion yen; pretax profit dropped by 20 percent, at...
Responding to increased global demand, Mitsui Chemicals Inc. (TYO:4183) will increase annual production capacity of its Milastomer thermoplastic elastomer by 5,000 tons. The company will invest almost 1 billion yen ($10 million) in expanding production facilities of its wholly-owned subsidiary Sun Alloys Co. Ltd., adding one production line of 5,000 annual tons. Construction will start in February 2017 and is planned...
Tokai Carbon Co. Ltd. (TYO:5301) announced on July 13 that it will increase the price at which it sells carbon black by 6.5 yen per kilogram for deliveries beginning Aug. 1. The change will apply to all varieties of carbon black the company sells in Japan. In its announcement, Tokai Carbon explained that the price of crude oil used to...
Zeon Corp. (TYO:4205) recently completed its expansion of production capacity at Mizushima Plant, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, for the Quintac series of styrene isoprene (SIS) thermoplastic elastomers and the Zeonex and Zeonor lines of cyclo-olefin polymer (COP), a high-transparency thermoplastic resin. With the enhancements made to the plant, annual SIS production capacity jumps from 42,000 tons to 60,000 tons, while that...
