Business Concentrates MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS
▸ Metabolix winds down biopolymers business
Ag boosts deal values The value of chemical merger and acquisition offers reached $67.1 billion in the second quarter of this year, mostly because of activity in agricultural chemicals. Deal values in the quarter were almost seven times as high as those in the year-earlier quarter, according to a recent report from consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Most of the increase was driven by one $55.2 billion megadeal—Bayer’s proposed acquisition of Monsanto—which, along with a subsequent offer in July, was rejected. Because of agricultural chemical deals, aggregate values in each of the past three quarters have exceeded $60 billion, a figure unprecedented since the Great Recession, PwC says. Those deals include Dow Chemical’s merger with DuPont and ChemChina’s planned purchase of Syngenta. Shareholders have already approved the Dow-DuPont combination. If one or both of the other deals move forward, they will likely trigger a round of divestitures and provide opportunities for players now sitting on the sidelines, PwC points out.—MARC REISCH
The biobased chemicals company Metabolix will wind down its polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) polymers business and focus on its newer business in crop yield improvement. The company says it will immediately eliminate 45 positions, about half of its workforce, and eventually get down to a staff of about 20 people. Metabolix warns that an inability to secure financing for the crop yield business could cause it to liquidate entirely. The firm has struggled since 2012, when Archer Daniels Midland ended a PHA joint venture.—MICHAEL MCCOY
allowing it to complete long hops over several days and nights.—MARC REISCH
SOLAR POWER
2-D MATERIALS
▸ Electric plane glides to a finish
▸ Thomas Swan links with graphene center
The Solar Impulse 2, an airplane powered solely by photovoltaic panels, has completed the 17th and final leg of its 43,000-km trip around the world, landing in Abu Dhabi on July 26. The journey, which began from the Persian Gulf city in March 2015, took 23 days
The British specialty chemical company Thomas Swan & Co. has joined the U.K.’s National Graphene Institute in a partnership to commercialize graphene and other two-dimensional materials. Thomas Swan says it will contribute materials to support both early-stage research and scale-up of new technologies at the institute. The company started making graphene in 2014 and 2-D boron nitride, which it calls the first noncarbon 2-D product, earlier this year.—MICHAEL MCCOY
POLYMERS
▸ LG Chem invests in elastomers
A view out the window of the Solar Impulse 2 above the Persian Gulf. of actual flight time but was punctuated by an eight-month delay in Hawaii because of overheated batteries. Built with lightweight materials from Covestro and Solvay, the plane stored energy in lithium-ion batteries,
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | AUGUST 1, 2016
LG Chem will spend $350 million to build an elastomers plant at its site in Daesan, South Korea. The facility will more than triple LG’s capacity for ethylene-1-octene and ethylene-1-butene copolymers to 290,000 metric tons per year. Scheduled to come online in 2018, the plant will use metallocene catalyst technology. LG says the expansion will put it in more direct competition with industry leaders Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil Chemical.—JEAN-FRANÇOIS
TREMBLAY
FINANCE
▸ Greenlight sees value in Chemours The hedge fund Greenlight Capital disclosed in its second-quarter report to investors that it purchased a stake in the embattled chemical maker Chemours. Greenlight says it bought part of the stake in late 2015 when Chemours’s stock fell in reaction to low titanium dioxide prices. It bought the rest last month after the short seller Citron Research suggested Chemours is headed for bankruptcy in the wake of lawsuits related to perfluorooctanoic acid contamination. Greenlight says it believes Chemours’s debt and legal liabilities are manageable.—MICHAEL
MCCOY
AGRICULTURE
▸ Indigo raises funds for plant microbes The plant microbiome company Indigo has raised $100 million in its third round of funding, led by the Alaska Permanent Fund. Indigo was formed at VentureLabs, the start-up-generating arm of Flagship Ventures. The company develops beneficial microbes that it discovers inside plants. The microbes can increase yield by conferring resistance to stresses such as water scarcity, the company claims. It just launched a coated cottonseed that improves water efficiency. A wheat product is next.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
CREDIT: SOLAR IMPULSE
BIOBASED CHEMICALS
SPECIALTY CHEMICALS
▸ Huntsman spin-off to include textiles Huntsman Corp. plans to include its textile effects business as part of the spin-off to shareholders of its titanium dioxide operations. Speaking to analysts during a review of Huntsman’s second-quarter earnings, CEO Peter Huntsman said the textile dyes and chemicals operation, which the firm bought from Ciba Specialty Chemicals in 2006, would “stabilize the earning cyclicality of TiO2” in the new entity. The combined operation, which had $2.9 billion in sales over the past 12 months—about 25% from textile effects—could be ready to be spun off at the end of this year or early in 2017, Huntsman said.—MARC REISCH
lateral sclerosis (ALS) treatment. The Japanese firm will also put up $30 million to fund development of Cytokinetics’ CK-2127107 for ALS. Astellas had already licensed the compound for other muscle diseases.—MICHAEL MCCOY
EMPLOYMENT
▸ Lilly’s Lechleiter to retire John C. Lechleiter will step down as president and CEO of Eli Lilly & Co. at the end of the year. Replacing him will be longtime Lilly executive David A. Ricks, who currently heads Lilly Bio-Medicines. Lechleiter, an or-
▸ J&J opiates unit goes to SK Capital
The Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma has expanded its collaboration with Cytokinetics, a biotech firm focused on muscle activators. Astellas H will pay $65 million N N for an option to comO mercialize tirasemtiv, N N a skeletal muscle activator now in a Phase III clinical trial as an amyotrophic Tirasemtiv
Lechleiter
Ricks
ganic chemist, joined Lilly in 1979 in its process research labs and moved up the ranks. He became CEO in 2008, when patent expirations on nearly all of Lilly’s key products loomed. Although Lechleiter helped the company mitigate some of the revenue loss by expanding in areas such as animal health, his tenure as CEO was marred by a string of drug pipeline setbacks.—LISA JARVIS
Business Roundup
CREDIT: ELI LILLY & CO. (LECHLEITER, RICKS)
Britain’s decision to exit the European Union isn’t stopping GlaxoSmithKline from deciding to invest more than $350 million at three of its U.K. sites to boost production of new respiratory therapies and biologic medicines. GSK, which employs about 6,000 at nine U.K. manufacturing locations, will expand in Barnard Castle in County Durham, England; Montrose in Angus, Scotland; and Ware in Hertfordshire, England. The company says most of the products will be exported around the world.—RICK
PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMICALS
▸ Astellas boosts Cytokinetics pact
▸ Sumitomo Chemical will build a 3,000-metric-ton-peryear polyethersulfone plant in Chiba, Japan, the company’s second such facility at the
▸ GSK to invest in three U.K. facilities
MULLIN
DRUG DEVELOPMENT
▸ Mitsubishi Chemical will sell its Chinese purified terephthalic acid (PTA) plant to Union King Holdings and its Indian PTA plant to Chatterjee Management Co. Combined annual sales of the businesses exceed $1 billion. The Japanese firm will keep PTA plants in Indonesia and South Korea.
PHARMACEUTICALS
site. Polyethersulfone is a high-end engineering plastic used in applications such as carbon fiber-epoxy airplane parts. ▸ DyStar, a dyes producer, will build a 3,000-m2 R&D center at its site in Nanjing, China. Expected to open in March 2017, the facility will study new molecules and develop chemicals for use in textiles and other industries. ▸ Dow Chemical researcher Abhishek Roy will receive the
SK Capital has acquired Noramco and Tasmanian Alkaloids and named Matthew Martin, previously the firms’ general manager, as the two firms’ CEO. SK Capital, a private investment firm, bought the companies from Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals division. Noramco is an opiates manufacturer, and Tasmanian Alkaloids is its raw materials subsidiary. The businesses, which include plants in Wilmington, Del., and Westbury, Australia, are reported to be valued at some $800 million.—RICK MULLIN
Society of Chemical Industry, America Section, Gordon E. Moore Medal in Philadelphia on Sept. 16. The medal, which recognizes young innovators, goes to Roy as the primary inventor of energy-saving Filmtec Eco reverse-osmosis membranes for water purification. ▸ Just Biotherapeutics has completed a $14 million Series A2 funding round led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and including Merck & Co., Lilly Asia Ventures, and Arch Venture Partners. Founded in 2014, Just seeks to lower the cost of biologic drug production.
▸ X-Chem and AbbVie have teamed up to use X-Chem’s DNA-encoded library, which includes more than 120 billion compounds, to find drug candidates against oncology and immunology targets. AbbVie is the latest partner for X-Chem, which was formed in 2009 by former executives of Praecis Pharmaceuticals. ▸ Pfizer has prevailed in its bid to acquire Bind Therapeutics, agreeing to pay $40 million in a court-authorized auction. Bind, a drug development company focused on cancer, filed for bankruptcy in May.
AUGUST 1, 2016 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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