DuPont (Wilmington, Delaware / USA; www.dupont.com), currently the Specialty Products division of DowDuPont (Midland, Michigan / USA; www.dow-dupont.com), has announced plans to build a new plant for compounded high-end engineering plastics and adhesives at Zhangjiagang in East China’s Jiangsu province. The USD 80m facility to be located in the Yangtze River International Chemical Industrial Park is scheduled to go onstream in 2020, with expansion in stages through 2023. It will be the first multi-business manufacturing facility in China for the new DuPont, which will become a standalone company from mid-2019.

The new compounding operation will supply “Zytel” PA engineering plastics, “Delrin” acetal resins, “Hytrel” polyesters and multi-base thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) along with lubricants and silicones to the transportation, electronics, industrial and consumer products markets. It will include production lines for automotive adhesives and will have provision to add other additional speciality products in future, DuPont said. The company has not revealed capacities for any of the plants, which are receiving investment incentives from the Zhangjiagang government.

Randy Stone, president of DuPont Transportation & Advanced Polymers, said the investment reinforces the US group’s commitment to China and the Asian market, where it sees strong growth potential. Stone said the new production facilities will support anticipated growth in the automotive sector. In particular, he said, DuPont’s advanced polymers and solutions are seeing strong demand from electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturers.

In September 2017, DowDuPont announced it would invest USD 42m to increase production capacity for the same products at its South China site in Shenzhen, Guangdong. The production lines are due to start up by the second quarter of 2019 and be fully operational by the end of 2019 – see Plasteurope.com of 27.09.2017.