Japan’s Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. will invest close to 110 billion yen (around US$1 billion) to expands its silicones business, one of its main businesses. It will expand its production capacity of silicone monomer, the intermediate product of silicones, and various types of silicone fluids, resins and rubber end products at its main bases in Japan and globally.
This, the company says, is due to requests for a wide variety of its silicone products from many customers around the world. It will also further strengthen its integrated production system.
These facility investments will be implemented in stages over about a period of two-and-a-half years, and the expansion of the production capacity of both silicone monomer and silicone end products will proceed in parallel.
The breakdown of investment amounts is expected to be about 50 billion yen for the expansion of production capacity of intermediate products such as monomers, about 50 billion yen for the expansion of production capacity of end products and about 10 billion yen for the expansion of other secondary facilities such as infrastructure and shipping. The expansion of capacity for silicone monomer will be done at its facilities in Japan and Thailand, and in addition to Japan, the capacity expansion for its end products will be carried out at existing bases in six overseas countries.
The company says the demand for silicone products is expected to increase at a rate surpassing that of the average increase in the world’s GDP and the expansions will allow it to extensively capture the demand for silicone products for which this kind of steady growth is expected.
For Shin-Etsu Chemical, silicones have been a strategically important business from the past up to the present, and going forward, it says it will work to further enhance the existence value of silicones.