LANXESS Germany's success: "Energy conservation and environmental protection are our opportunities"

“The EU will standardize and grade tire oil consumption and safety, and guide consumers to choose greener and energy-saving tires since 2012. This will be a rare opportunity for LANXESS. Our rubber products will surely receive more tire manufacturers. Welcome,” said Axel Claus Heitmann, CEO of LANXESS, a German specialty chemical company, in Düsseldorf, Germany, who is a reporter who has come forward to participate in LANXESS Media Day.

LANXESS, a chemical company that produces traditional chemicals such as plastics and rubber, sees energy conservation and environmental protection as the greatest opportunity for development. This may seem bizarre, but it precisely reflects LANXESS's success. LANXESS is not a simple chemical company. It will position itself as a "high-tech" enterprise in the chemical industry. It concentrates on high-end products driven by technology development, such as rubber for high-performance tires, special plastic parts for electronic equipment, and clean water. Chemical additives.

As Werner Breuers, a LANXESS board member, said: "A chemical company that wants to establish itself in today's market competition is only satisfied with acquiring the status of a multinational company. In fact, today your goal should be To become a future company, in order to achieve this status, companies must do their utmost to develop technological innovations that focus on long-term success.” At the LANXESS factory in the outskirts of Düsseldorf, the reporter visited the factory of the “Future Enterprise”. laboratory.

Everyone first came to the rubber polymerization laboratory. The laboratory actually occupied a whole three-story building, with a variety of pipes and electronic equipment inside, where blue-collar workers and white-collar researchers collaborated. A technician told reporters that one of their ongoing experiments was to solve the contradiction between fuel consumption and safety.

In the design concept of tires in the past, fuel consumption and safety were actually a contradiction. If you want to reduce fuel consumption, you need to reduce the tire rolling resistance, which will inevitably increase the braking distance during emergency braking, affecting safety. However, LANXESS scientists proposed a brand new “functional group” concept, trying to make the tire intelligent, through the different functional groups of the rubber structure, in turn play a role in different circumstances, and ultimately solve this conflict. Researchers told reporters that this concept has been successful in the laboratory and applied for a patent, and it is expected to achieve a small-scale application within two years and achieve industrial production within four years. In 2010, LANXESS rubber materials were named “Tire Industry Best Supplier of the Year” by the Global Tire Industry Expo due to its low energy consumption, high safety, and low carbon emissions.

In another lab, the researchers showed reporters a new type of plastic being tested. This plastic has been able to replace metal in terms of strength, plasticity and acid resistance, but its weight has been greatly reduced and its cost is not high. At present, this new material has been applied in the new Audi A8 and is expected to be widely used in the automotive and industrial fields in the future.

As LANXESS researchers said: "It is precisely based on research and development that every product manufactured by LANXESS is an unprecedented new product."

However, LANXESS does not "innovate for innovation," and any of its innovations are closely linked to market demand. According to reports, in 2009 LANXESS conducted a total of about 160 R&D projects, of which approximately 65% ​​of R&D projects are planned to be brought to market by the end of 2010 or to reach the technology implementation stage. Overall, 80% of LANXESS projects under development can go to market within two years. This strategy brings a rapid return on investment and makes innovation equally economically viable.

He Demang positioned LANXESS as “a company composed of entrepreneurs”. It is precisely relying on the innovation of high-end products that allows LANXESS to get rid of the high pollution and high energy consumption faced by chemical companies and turn to energy saving and environmental protection as the largest Development opportunities. It is precisely because of the large number of companies like LANXESS that the current economic growth in other European countries and the United States and Japan is weak. From the perspective of LANXESS's success, we seem to have seen the secret of Germany’s economic success.