PolyMirae Company Ltd., a a 50/50 joint venture between LyondellBasell (Rotterdam, the Netherlands; www.lyondellbasel.com) and Daelim Industrial (www.daelimchem.co.kr), announced that it would establish a joint venture with SK Advanced in South Korea. The new company will be a joint venture between PolyMirae and SK Advanced. The joint venture intends to build a new 400,000 metric tons/year polypropylene plant to serve customers in Asia. The plant will be located in the southeastern port city of Ulsan and is dependent on regulatory filings and permitting reviews.
Construction on the project will begin in January 2019 and operations at the plant will begin in the first half of 2021.
“Through direct investment or through a joint venture such as PolyMirae, we continue to build production capacity to serve rapidly growing end markets in Asia,” said James Seward, Vice President of Joint Ventures and International Marketing at LyondellBasell. “With the addition of this joint venture’s capacity, PolyMirae will ensure that automotive manufacturers in South Korea and throughout Asia will continue to be able to locally source the polypropylene they need to advance the next generation of fuel efficient vehicles, and that LyondellBasell will gain access to additional export volumes to ensure our global production footprint will continue to grow alongside our customer base.”
The new polypropylene plant will be one of the largest of its kind in Asia and will utilize LyondellBasell’s Spheripol technology. Polypropylene manufactured at the joint venture will be sold to customers in South Korea and exported throughout Asia for use in automotive components, injection molding, blow molding and packaging film. Some of the polypropylene will also be sold to compounding companies in South Korea and the broader region.