Sep 20 2004
Symyx Technologies, Inc. today announced that Dow has achieved a successful start up of the first commercial plant for its family of Versify* Plastomers and Elastomers in Tarragona, Spain. This new family of specialty propylene-ethylene copolymers is manufactured using a new catalyst system discovered in a collaboration between Dow and Symyx, combined with Dow’s proprietary INSITE* Technology. Symyx expects to earn royalties from the sale of these polymers starting in the first quarter of 2005.
“VERSIFY Plastomers and Elastomers are an innovative and unique addition to Dow’s plastics portfolio that both completes and enhances our specialty polymer offering,” said Romeo Kreinberg, senior vice president for Plastics. “The product range combines Dow’s strength in catalyst and process technology as well as material and polymer science to bridge current product performance gaps and help meet unmet customer needs. The strong customer demand and interest has accelerated the start up of our first commercial plant just seven months after the product introduction.”
“This is an important milestone for Symyx, when an innovative discovery coming out of our labs goes into full commercial production,” said Steve Goldby, chairman and chief executive officer of Symyx Technologies. “This achievement underscores the value we deliver to our customers, and reinforces our strategy of sharing that value as our customers achieve commercial success.”
Dow characterizes the VERSIFY Plastomers & Elastomers as “a highly versatile family of polymers designed to improve optics, sealing and hot tack performance, elasticity, flexibility, and softness for flexible and rigid packaging producers, manufacturers of thermoplastic elastomers and olefins, and converters in the consumer products sector”. Further information about VERSIFY is available at http://www.dowversify.com. Dow will also be featuring VERSIFY Plastomers and Elastomers at the October K trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany.
“Customer feedback since our product launch earlier this year has been tremendous, confirmed by strong sales orders across a number of key application areas,” said Ralf Brinkmann, global product director. “We are excited to see how quickly customers have taken advantage of this new polymer technology and have already started to introduce winning product solutions into their market segments based on the unique technology used to produce VERSIFY Plastomers & Elastomers.”
For more information on elastomers, click here.