Solvay SA, the 150-year-old Belgian company that’s moving from commodity chemicals to specialty materials and additives, will expand a high-performance plastics plant in India to cope with demand from smartphone and aircraft makers.
Production of polyether ether ketone polymer resins, known as PEEK, will increase 25 percent at the Panoli plant in the state of Gujarat, the Brussels-based company said. Demand for PEEK and related compounds is growing at about 8 percent to 10 percent annually as handset and tablet makers need heat- and chemical-resistant plastics to fit more technology into a smaller space.
“Today’s announcement to de-bottleneck capacity shows we are determined to keep pace with this growing demand worldwide,” Augusto Di Donfrancesco, president of Solvay Specialty Polymers, said in a statement on December 3, 2014.