SABIC To Open Four R&D Centers

Polymer producer Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC) will launch four previously announced R&D centers employing 650 people at a cost of $500 million in Saudi Arabia, India, and China in 2013. Opening by April will be the company’s Corporate Research & Innovation Center at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, near Jeddah. Its mission will be to innovate through collaborations with academic researchers. The SABIC Plastic Applications Development Center, which will focus on new applications and products, is to open by July at Riyadh’s King Saud University. The two Saudi R&D centers will employ about 150 professionals. In Bangalore, India, SABIC expects to open a research center for chemistry, materials science, process engineering, and analytical and application technology by July. And in Shanghai SABIC plans to open a center for research in a variety of areas by September. When the company announced the Shanghai project last year, it said that it would employ 200 scientists and cost $100 million to set up. It now says that the Bangalore and Shanghai centers will together employ 500.