“Market demand sets the direction, and R&D has to stay close to it,” Chairman and General Manager Zhu Xuejun told a Shanghai Securities News reporter in a recent interview.
Eleven years on COC
In 2014 the company found that the COC used in high-end optical lenses and pharmaceutical packaging in China was largely imported, while domestic COC monomer synthesis technology did not yet exist. Development work began that year.
In the first three years, catalyst screening alone took more than 200 experiments. The development chain for this material is long — from monomer through to downstream qualification, it needs the whole value chain.
On 30 June 2025 the company announced that its 20,000 t/a aliphatic amine expansion and its 10,000 t/a high-clarity material project (phase two, 5,000 t/a) had passed safety-installation completion review, entered production and produced on-specification product.
Incremental demand for COC in head-up displays and capacitor films is expected to open further market space. Pharmaceutical packaging qualification takes three to five years, after which supply relationships tend to be stable.
Polyetheramine: from commodity to differentiated grades
Polyetheramine is an important component of the epoxy curing systems used in wind-turbine blade composites. Demand rose sharply in 2021 and capacity grew from 5,000 t in 2018 to 20,000 t in 2023; prices and margins later came under pressure as grid-connected wind additions and industry capacity shifted.
The business was accordingly split into two lines: wind-power commodity grades, moved to the Qianjiang site for cost-competitive volume production, and specialty grades developed at the Wuxi headquarters for shale oil and gas recovery, elastomeric nylon and similar applications.
Capacity and people
The capacity plan pairs 20,000 t/a of polyetheramine at Qianjiang with the second COC phase at Wuxi, forming a “Hubei cost centre plus Jiangsu R&D centre” structure. A core-employee shareholding platform lets technical staff share in the company’s growth.
Excerpted from a Shanghai Securities News report republished on the company’s official WeChat account. Views and wording are those of the original report and are not a warranty of product performance or market position.