BASF to Sell Austria Paper Coating Plant for €30 Million

BASF SE has signed a contract with Synthomer Austria GmbH, a subsidiary Synthomer plc, for the sale of its production site for styrene butadiene dispersions for paper coating in Pischelsdorf, Austria, for a purchase price of €30 million.

The buyer will take over 42 employees at the site. The transaction is expected to be completed by late January 2018.

BASF also said that it will concentrate on production of paper coating dispersions in Europe at two sites, the Ludwigshafen Verbund site and the Hamina site in Finland.  The goal is to strengthen BASF’s ability to compete in the challenging market environment of paper coating dispersions in the long term.

In future, BASF will supply customers for styrene butadiene dispersions in Europe from existing production capacities at the sites in Ludwigshafen and Hamina. Furthermore, paper dispersion production will continue without changes in the other BASF production sites for paper coating dispersions in the EMEA region, i.e. Gebze, Turkey and Durban, South Africa.

Paper dispersions are applied to paper together with other additives and pigments to improve such properties as the print quality of graphic paper as well as packaging paper and cardboard.

“This decision helps us improve our competitiveness and creates the conditions necessary to offer products and services to our customers at attractive terms in the future. We will continue to supply our Austrian paper customers with the usual range of styrene butadiene and styrene acrylic dispersions combined with technical on-site services and optimized logistics,” said professor Thomas Schiele, vice president paper coating chemicals Europe at BASF.