Beker seeks stake in Commercial Solvents Beker Industries, a young but fast growing and obviously ambitious pro ducer of fertilizer materials, has launched what is probably its most ambitious expansion effort yet. It is trying to buy up a 26% interest in Commercial Solvents Corp. (CSC) by offering CSC stockholders $26.50 a share for 800,000 shares of the compa ny's common stock. CSC, however, has urged its stock holders to turn down the Beker bid, warning that it could lead to Beker's gaining control of CSC and claiming that the price offered is "unrealistically low." (CSC shares had ranged in price on the New York Stock Exchange be tween $14% and $22% this year prior to the offer and sold as low as $101/4 last year.) Beker says it wants the CSC shares for investment rather than con trol but adds that if it is successful it will seek representation on CSC's board. Beker has borrowed $20 million from First National Bank of Chicago to cover most of the $21.2 million it will need to purchase the shares. CSC, which is larger and considera Aluminum truck wheels roll along pro bly more diversified than Beker, had duction line at Alcoa's Cleveland plant sharply higher sales and earnings last year and says first-quarter profits this the nation's largest user of electrical year may be as much as 70 to 80 cents power because it would use a new pro a share, up from only 28 cents a year cess that is expected to reduce electri ago. cal power by as much as 30%. Alcoa is For all of 1973, CSC's sales totaled a building this 15,000 ton unit at Pales record $128.9 million, a gain of 16%, tine, Tex., where it will use a smelting while net income climbed 157% to process that took 15 years and $25 mil nearly $5.5 million ($1.76 a share). In lion to develop. The company says that addition, the company had an extraor the plant has an ultimate potential ca dinary gain of more than $6.4 million, pacity of 300,000 tons per year, but ex largely from the sale of a Canadian fer pansion will depend upon Alcoa's eval tilizer operation. Its earnings last year uation of its operating experience and were the highest since it netted $6.3 market demand. million in 1966. CSC credits increased The new Alcoa process combines profits from its wide line of specialty alumina (the oxide of aluminum) and and fine chemicals, animal health and chlorine in a reactor which chemically nutrition products, and carbon black, converts the oxide to aluminum chlo as well as increased sales of fertilizers, ride. The chloride is processed electro- for its 1973 improvement. lytically in an enclosed cell to separate Beker also reported sharp gains in the compound into molten aluminum 1973. Sales more than doubled to $73.6 and chlorine. The chlorine will be recy million, and net income leaped 152% to cled continuously to the reactor in a $12.4 million ($1.77 a share). The com closed loop. pany was set up in late 1971 by Erol In the traditional Hall process, alu Beker, now chairman and president, to mina is desolved in a molten cryolite, a buy the Hooker Farm Chemicals phos fluoride chemical which has become phate operations that Occidental Pe scarce and costly. The Alcoa smelting troleum was forced to sell under a Fed process eliminates both the need for eral Trade Commission divestiture cryolite and the expense of containing order. Beker now produces phosphate fluoride emissions. fertilizer materials, primarily diamIf the aluminum industry gets its monium phosphate, at plants in Taft, prices up to where it wants them this La., Marseilles, 111., and Conda, Idaho, year, perhaps other companies will most of which it exports. It recently commit themselves to joining Amax bought three old and relatively small and Alcoa in building new plants. But anhydrous ammonia plants with a total any new construction started this year capacity of 480,000 tons a year that it won't begin to relieve the aluminum plans to relocate and have running shortage until at least 1976. A good again by early next year: one at its rule of thumb is that it takes $10 mil present plant in Idaho, one at Sarnia, lion and two years to build a new alu Ont., and one in the Southwest (C&EN, Feb. 18, page 18). The compa minum smelter.
ny notes that by moving existing plants it can get on stream more quickly and at lower cost than by building new plants of equivalent size. Beker at present buys ammonia from CSC under two contracts covering more than 120,000 tons a year. Last summer, the company approached CSC president William S. Leonhardt, who was also a director of Beker until he resigned just after the tender offer was made, to discuss a possible combi nation of the two firms' businesses, but the overture was rebuffed.
Ciba-Geigy builds insecticide plant Ciba-Geigy plans to be producing its chlordimeform insecticide in the U.S. in time for the 1975-76 growing season. It will make the material, tradenamed Galecron, in a plant at St. Gabriel, La., where it broke ground last week. The new plant, adjacent to a CibaGeigy triazine herbicide facility, will cost more than $14 million. M. W. Kellogg Co. will handle design, engi neering, and procurement for the in secticide plant. Ciba-Geigy now imports chlor dimeform from a plant at Monthey, Switzerland. Nor-Am Agricultural Products, Inc., also imports chlordime form into the U.S. from West Germa ny's Schering. Ciba-Geigy and Schering share basic product patents on chlordimeform as a result of litigation following their nearly simultaneous dis covery of the compound. Chlordimeform, N'-(4-chloro-otolyl) - Ν,Ν-dimethylformamidine, is most widely used as an ovicide to con trol cotton boll worm, bud worm, and leaf perforator. It also is used as an in secticide or miticide on several coolweather vegetable crops, such as cab bage, and on some deciduous fruits. Chlordimeform could become a major replacement for now-banned DDT, says John R. Ferguson, vice president of Ciba-Geigy's agricultural division. Although expensive—$20 to $24 a gallon at retail for an emulsifiable concentrate—it also may partially replace such organophosphate insecti cides as parathion in controlling cotton insects. It is claimed to be less toxic to mammals than commonly used organophosphates and breaks down in three to four weeks to compounds of low tox icity. Ciba-Geigy has not disclosed the ca pacity of its St. Gabriel plant. When it starts up, the plant probably will be run at little more than 50% capacity, Mr. Ferguson says. He expects that 20 to 30% of the output will be exported initially, with exports disappearing by about 1980 as U.S. demand grows. The 20% or so of the Swiss plant's output now imported into the U.S. will be available for sales in other parts of the world. March 11, 1974 C&EN
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