Everyone’s looking toward Asia now. Long gone are the days when cheap manufactured goods were the only things coming out of India and China, the world’s two most populous countries. The until recently staggering economic growth of the two nations was increasingly being powered by high-tech and cutting-edge industries. Greater involvement in the Asian market is therefore one of the key strategic objectives of the German specialty chemicals group LANXESS. As company CEO Dr. Axel C. Heitmann explains, India has a crucial role to play: “Beside China, India is our most important growth market in Asia. We intend to fully capitalize on this growth potential by means of targeted investment.”
With this objective in mind, in 2008 the specialty chemicals group began to turn Jhagadia, an industrial site in northwest India, into the largest LANXESS location in the country. The project includes not only relocation of rubber chemicals production from Thane, further south, but also construction of a new plant for production of ion exchange resins. The company will invest approximately €50 million on the site expansion. The two production facilities are scheduled to begin operation in 2010, creating around 250 new jobs.
With these two plants LANXESS will be able to meet the strong demand from major growth markets, in India and beyond. LANXESS is currently the only Western company producing rubber chemicals in the long-termexpanding Indian tire market. The market is growing not only because growing prosperity is fueling demand, but also because there are more and more customers who want quality and long service life. In other words, there will be a growing need for specialty chemicals from LANXESS.
The same applies to the two other growth markets that LANXESS will soon be supplying from Jhagadia: the pharmaceutical and computer chip industries. Both sectors need extremely pure water to prevent product contamination during production, and that calls for the use of ion exchange resins from LANXESS. The investment represents the largest project of the last ten years for this business unit. “We are talking about one of the most dynamically growing, most promising sectors in the industrial chemicals market,” explains Rainier van Roessel, LANXESS board of management member with responsibility for this area of business. “We plan to generate profitable growth and reinforce our strong position on the world market.” But why India? What is it that makes this country so attractive for the group?
