Teijin Chemical of Japan will enter the polycarbonate resin market in North America. The company will relocate its sales center in Atlanta to Detroit. Together with the company’s previously acquired supplier, CSP Plastics, the company will launch the PC resin business.
In the past, Teijin was mainly engaged in optical materials such as sunglasses in the North American market. In the future, through the Detroit branch, it will be able to better realize the technology development in the North American market and form an integrated R&D and sales pattern with the Asian market.
Polycarbonate (PC) is a kind of thermoplastic engineering plastics with excellent overall performance. It has excellent electrical properties, low water absorption, good light transmission, and visible light transmittance of more than 90%. It is the only one among the five general engineering plastics. Good transparency of the variety, while also having a high strength, ductility and toughness varieties, which are widely used in electronic appliances, home appliances, building materials, automobile manufacturing and medical equipment and other fields. At present, the material has become the five engineering plastics The fastest growing general engineering plastics.
Since 2005, the consumption of polycarbonate in China has rapidly increased from 600,000 tons to 1.8 million tons, and the average annual consumption growth rate has been 10%. It is expected that the demand for PC in China will continue to grow rapidly. The thermal insulation performance of polycarbonate sheet is higher than that of ordinary glass. 25% higher, impact strength is 250 times that of glass, and weight is only 1/2 of glass, so PC is the ideal lighting material for architectural decoration. PC sheet in various shapes of large-area roof, stair railing and high-rise Building lighting facilities and other fields have a wide range of applications.
The automobile is another important terminal application of the PC. The consumption ratio in developed countries is about 20%, but the proportion of consumption in the country is only about 5%. The trend of lighter weight is more obvious, and polycarbonate has excellent resistance. Impact strength, ease of mold processing, significantly reduced weight compared to traditional materials such as high speed steels and aluminum alloys. In addition, PC films used in photovoltaics, light diffusion PCs for LED lighting, radiation resistant PCs in medical devices, etc. It is a potential demand hot spot in the future. According to forecast, the future China's polycarbonate market will still maintain 8%-10% growth.
At present, the global supply of polycarbonate is highly concentrated. Due to the high threshold of polycarbonate production technology, production capacity is mainly concentrated in multinational chemical companies, and supply is highly concentrated. According to the authoritative ICIS and Bayer statistics, the global top six companies have a production capacity of up to 94% Due to the strict control of technology by the international giants, the domestic production of polycarbonate units is mostly invested by foreign companies or Sino-foreign joint ventures. In 2016, China’s actual production was only 570,000 tons, and imports exceeded 1.319 million tons.