Bayer Picks China For Materials Plants

In what it calls one of the biggest investments to date for its MaterialScience business, Bayer plans to spend about $1.3 billion on new polycarbonate and isocyanate plants in China’s Shanghai Chemical Industry Park by 2016. Bayer will construct a 200,000-metric-ton-per-year polycarbonate plant and increase the capacity of its existing polycarbonate plant there by 50% to 300,000 metric tons. The company plans to build a 500,000-metric-ton methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) plant and expand its existing MDI plant by about 40% to 500,000 metric tons. And it will build a 50,000-metric-ton hexamethylene diisocyanate facility and expand an existing one. In addition, Bayer is moving the headquarters of its polycarbonate business from Leverkusen, Germany, to Shanghai.