Business Roundup

Total Petrochemicals will close a 200 million-lb-per-year polystyrene plant in Carville, La. The company attributes the closure to a shift in the supply-demand balance of the North American market. Total says it will focus on its other U.S. polystyrene units, which have combined capacity of 1.45 billion lb.

Phillips 66 will be the name of the refining and marketing company being spun off of Conoco­Phillips. With headquarters in Houston, Phillips 66 will own a 50% stake in Chevron Phillips Chemical, a petrochemical joint venture with Chevron.

LyondellBasell Industries has declared a special dividend of $4.50 per share. The payout amounts to a total of $2.6 billion. It is being financed through cash on hand plus $1 billion of recently issued notes.

AB Sciex has acquired the mass spectrometry distribution business of Labindia Instruments. Separately, Leica Microsystems bought Labin­dia’s microscopy and histopathology business. The India-based firm continues to represent other instrument makers, including Bruker Optics and Smiths Detection.

Clariant has sold its European floor polish additives business to Michelman, a Cincinnati-based firm that specializes in barrier and functional coatings. The business includes acrylic and styrene-acrylic dispersions and emulsions of polyethylene and montan wax.

BASF will relocate the global headquarters for its dispersions and pigments division to Hong Kong. The move will affect about 50 people based in Ludwig­shafen, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland. Staff who decline to move will get new jobs within BASF in Europe.

DuPont and BioLeap will collaborate on using molecular design software to discover crop protection compounds. BioLeap’s fragment-based molecular design software is used to identify leads for drug discovery but has applications in consumer products and agriculture as well.

Bend Research has signed an agreement with Merck & Co. granting the drugmaker access to Bend’s spray-dried dispersion technology. Bend, a drug-formulation development company, may also provide Merck with access to additional drug delivery techniques.