Mitsubishi Rayon acquires US carbon fibre firm

LONDON (ICIS)–Japan’s Mitsubishi Rayon said in a statement on Thursday that it has acquired Gemini Composites, a US-based firm that designs and engineers carbon fibre composite components.

Gemini Composites, of Seattle, Washington, is specialised in product development using forged composite technology.

The acquisition would enhance Mitsubishi Rayon’s product development capability for automotive sheet moulding compound (SMC) components and enable the development of innovative products based on a component design-driven approach, it said.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Mitsubishi Rayon describes itself as the world’s largest manufacturer and supplier of carbon fibre sheet moulding compounds (CFSMC), which is the base material used in forged composite technology. The company has been marketing CFSMC to car manufacturers in Japan, Germany and North America since it established a new SMC production line in 2015 in Japan, it said.

The automotive industry is a major global consumer of petrochemicals which contributes more than a third of the raw material costs of an average vehicle. ICIS tracks the movement of petrochemical raw material costs in auto production both globally and regionally with the weighted ICIS Basket of Automotive Petrochemicals (IBAP).

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