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Manufacturers consolidate and strive for strength through greater size.
CONSOLIDATION REMAINS the name of the game in the polyvinyl chloride industry as companies strive to capitalize on their combined strengths and keep up with increasingly powerful industry leaders.
The most recent deals came at the end of the year as Shin-Etsu completed its purchase of Rovin, the 50-50 joint venture between Shell Chemicals and Akzo Nobel. Shell also sold its PVC and VCM operations in southern France to Solvay and Elf Atochem. Shin Etsu's acquisition of Rovin came after 15 months of negotiations that were deemed intense and complex.
Rovin, Europe's fourth largest PVC producer, has a 550,000-ton-per-year vinyl chloride monomer plant at Akzo's Botlek site in Rotterdam and a 595,000-ton-peryear PVC unit at Shell's Pernis complex in the Netherlands. It also has a 90,000-ton processing arrangement with Neste Chemicals at Porvoo, Finland. The deal makes Shin-Etsu the global leader in PVC with a worldwide nameplate of 2.6 million metric tons.
Shin-Etsu originally planned to also buy Shell's PVC and VCM holdings in the south of France. Instead, Elf Atochem and Solvay, through Solvin, its PVC joint venture with BASF, have acquired Shell's 230,000-ton-peryear suspension PVC plant at Bette. The two companies also purchased Shell's 60 percent stake in a 375,000-tonper-year VCM unit at Fos, in which Elf Atochem already held a 40 percent share.
The purchase will raise Solvin's capacity for both PVC and VCM by 80,000 tons. In addition, the...