Rickmansworth UK -- Stepan Europe said 17 May that it plans to raise prices for all European Stepanpol aromatic polyester polyols by Euro 100-150 per tonne for the third quarter, to meet rising costs of feedstocks.
"The continuing rise in costs of our primary feed-stocks, ortho-xylene (OX) and di-ethylene glycol (DEG) is forcing us to increase the selling prices of all grades of Stepanpol aromatic polyester polyols effective 1 July 2010," said Roger Stubbs, vice president European Polymers, for Stepan, in the company announcement.
Stepan supplied a graph showing that its costs have increased by over 30 percent since the end of last year and by more than 70 percent from a year ago.
"Although we were able to achieve price increases in Q2, the continued surge in raw material costs has now overtaken any benefit gained from that initiative, forcing us to move prices up again in Q3 by an unprecedented amount," Stepan added.
Stepan intends to "maintain our competitive position in the market as demonstrated by our continuing investment in manufacturing capacity to expand our plant at Wesseling," (near Cologne in Germany). This expansion will more than double its annual European capacity to 120 kilotonnes.
According to the US-headquartered group, "All of the major components for our Wesseling plant capacity expansion have been delivered to site, ground works commenced at the start of the year and are progressing well according to plan."
PIC: Construction of Stepan's APP expansion at Wesseling
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