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Business

Business Roundup

May 23, 2011 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 89, Issue 21

Altana will acquire Color Chemie, a German maker of water-based printing inks for boxes, foils, gift wrap, and wallpaper. Color Chemie operates plants in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland. It had sales last year of about $65 million.

Momentive Specialty Chemicals and the Chinese firm UPC Technology are setting up a joint venture to produce specialty phenolic resins. The partners will build a plant, scheduled to open in late 2012, next to a UPC facility in Zhenjiang in China’s Jiangsu province.

Indorama will expand purified terephthalic acid capacity at its plant in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, by 250,000 tons per year, bringing capacity to 600,000 metric tons by 2014. Indorama acquired the plant as part of its 2008 purchase of Eastman Chemical’s European polyethylene terephthalate business.

Linde and algal oil producer Sapphire Energy will develop a low-cost method to deliver carbon dioxide to open-pond algae-to-fuel systems. According to Sapphire, a commercial-scale facility requires 10,000 metric tons of CO2 per day. The partnership aims to deliver the gas from large emitters such as power stations and chemical plants.

PerkinElmer has acquired Labtronics, an Ontario-based provider of electronic laboratory notebook software. The purchase beefs up the firm’s informatics offerings, which include software from ArtusLabs and CambridgeSoft, both acquired in March.

BASF plans to build a plant in Durban, South Africa, to manufacture acrylic dispersions for use in paint and construction products. Production is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2012.

Sigma-Aldrich’s SAFC unit and Agilent Technologies have signed a licensing agreement under which SAFC will market new nucleic acid synthesis monomers from Agilent. The deal covers TC-RNA phosphoramidites prepackaged for use in most nucleic acid synthesizers.

Merck & Co. is closing Inspire Pharmaceuticals’ Raleigh, N.C., headquarters following the completion of its $430 million acquisition of the biotech firm. About 60 of Inspire’s 175 employees work at the site. Merck has yet to determine how many of those employees will be shifted to other sites, but it concedes job losses are imminent.

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