European car sector and its suppliers are
pioneering new light-weight, energy-sav-ing materials, such as plastic compounds
requiring new types of coatings.
BASF, Europe’s main OEM coatings
producer whose major competitors are
PPG Industries and DuPont, has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of being the
first paint manufacturer to introduce waterborne OEM basecoats, which it estimates were applied to 35 million vehicles
worldwide last year.
The company is continuing to use Europe as an R&D platform for new coatings
concepts aimed at the global market, such
as mirror effect paints, primer and basecoat
integration, cathodic e-coatings and
scratch-resistant paints. New technologies
helped BASF achieve increased automobile
coatings sales last year in Europe.
“We are very satisfied with our [auto-
mobile coatings] business,” said Kurt
Bock, BASF’s chairman, at the company’s
annual press conference at Ludwigshafen,
Germany, in February. “It is profitable and
is well positioned all over the world.”
Its OEM coatings operation in Europe
fits with the company’s strategy in the re-
gion of aligning itself with customer busi-
nesses, which are in the higher ends of
their markets. “These are companies that
are growing and exporting their products
all over the world,” said Bock.
Bayer MaterialScience (BMS) an-
nounced in January that it is building a
plant at Leverkusen, Germany, to make
hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) and
isophorone diisocyanate (IPDI), which are
used mainly as raw materials for high-
quality low-solvent polyurethane top-
coats for automobiles.
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