Business Roundup

H.B. Fuller has been awarded $12.8 million in damages in an arbitration case against the consulting firm Accenture related to the installation of enterprise resource planning software in 2014. Fuller says Accenture didn’t honor its contractual obligations.

Cleveland Potash, a British subsidiary of Israel Chemicals Ltd., is set to cut about 700 of the 1,100 employees working at its Boulby, England, potash facility by 2018. The firm plans to stop mining the fertilizer in Boulby by then and instead invest around $60 million to upgrade the site to make polysulfate fertilizer.

Qatar Petroleum is pulling out of a $4 billion petrochemicals project planned for southern Vietnam. The remaining shareholders in the project include Siam Cement, PetroVietnam, and Vinachem.

Clariant has started construction of a facility in Surabaya, Indonesia, that will produce bleaching earth and other materials. The company will invest more than $10 million at the site, its sixth production base in the country.

Kemira is joining with the start-up Aqsens to develop and market on-site liquid analyses for the oil and gas industry. The Finnish partners’ first offering is a means of measuring residual polymeric scale-inhibitor concentration in the oil field in a few minutes.

Mitsui Chemicals will more than double production capacity for nonwoven breathable films at its site in Thailand’s Rayong province. The company says demand for the material, used in making diapers, is strong in China and Southeast Asia.

Thermo Fisher Scientific will work with Novartis and Pfizer to develop a multimarker, next-generation sequencing oncology test to serve as a companion diagnostic for non-small-cell lung cancer. The companies say the test will help match cancer patients to specific drug candidates.

Catalent has been forced by French officials to halt production at its softgel capsules facility in Beinheim, France, after the firm reported incidents of misplaced capsules that indicated possible tampering. The company is working to restart production.