Lonza’s Singapore PIA force majeure to continue

04 October 2007 04:08  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Lonza’s force majeure at its purified isophtalic acid (PIA) plant in Singapore will continue despite the unit’s return to full operations, a company official said on Thursday.

“We are monitoring the performance of some critical equipment in the plant at Jurong Island. The facility is running at full capacity for now and we will make a decision on whether the force majeure will be lifted early next week,” the Lonza executive said.

He said that the company was not taking any orders for October as the focus was on fulfilling contractual obligations for the month of September.

Lonza Singapore is currently running two weeks behind its delivery schedule for September’s cargoes and will only take new orders for November to ensure that its backlog of orders does not accumulate further.

The plant was restarted 24 September after it was shut for 11 days due to technical problems. A planned lifting of its force majeure this week did not materialise.

Lonza’s Singapore plant has an annual capacity of 6,000 tonnes of PIA and has been recently acquired by the Perstorp group. The deal is expected to be finalised by the end of this year.

PIA is a key ingredient in manufacturing performance coatings, unsaturated polyester resins and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle grade chips.

Other major producers of PIA include Japan’s A.G. International Chemical and Korea’s KP Chemicals.

By: Hong Chou Hui
+65 6780 4359

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