Company News

Thai company on PET acquisition trail

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While the Invista deal includes two of the company's plants in Spartanburg, South Carolina, US, and Querétaro, Mexico, it does not include the Polymer & Resins Wilmington, North Carolina site, or Invista's European Polymer & Resins business, which includes manufacturing operations in Gersthofen, Germany.

At Spartanburg, Invista produces polyester used in bottles for carbonated and non-carbonated drinks and food and custom-container applications and polyester staple fibre and speciality polymers for a variety of applications. The site has a total capacity of 470,000 tonnes. Querétaro produces polymer and polyester staple fibre similar to that produced at Spartanburg with a total capacity of 535,000 tonnes.

Indorama already has existing manufacturing sites in the US in North Carolina and Alabama (AlphaPET). The acquisition of Invista will allow it to enter new markets of Mexico and the US speciality PET fibre sector.

In China, Indorama will purchase Guangdong Shinda UHMWPE's plant at Kaiping City, Guangdong Province, making it its first investment in the country.

Charting the company's growth over the past few years, it acquired the StarPET facility in the US in 2003 and a few years later in 2006 set up Orion Global PET in Lithuania to cater to the European market. In 2008, it acquired Eastman Chemical's PET and PTA facilities in the Netherlands and the UK and also bought in the same year Tuntex, the largest polyester fibres and yarns producer in Thailand. This year, it increased capacity at its Rotterdam site to 390,000 tonnes. Last year, Indorama built its AlphaPet PET facility in the US, and later this year entered into a joint venture with Ottana Energia to buy the Sardinian PET and PTA facilities from Equipolymers, which is a joint venture between Dow Chemical and the Petroleum Industries Company (PIC) of Kuwait.