A nylon maker goes bankrupt, a carbon capture start-up raises money, Germany’s Merck acquires SpringWorks, and more
Nylon maker Ascend files for bankruptcy Struggling with debt and a market swamped with overcapacity, the nylon 6,6 producer Ascend Performance Materials has declared bankruptcy in Texas. It has secured $250 million in debtor-in-possession financing that will allow it to continue running until it wraps up the restructuring process in about 6 months. Headquartered in Houston, Ascend makes nylon 6,6 and its precursors, acrylonitrile, adiponitrile, adipic acid, and hexamethylenediamine. The company had sales of $2.4 billion in 2023. The New York City–based private equity firm SK Capital bought the business from Solutia in 2009 for the bargain price of $50 million in cash. Ascend blames the bankruptcy on its underlying financial structure and high debt obligations. This past February, S&P downgraded its rating for Ascend because of underperformance in 2024 and a “challenging operating environment.” Last year, Ascend closed its compounding plant in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Earlier this year, the company closed a facility in Greenwood, South Carolina, where it had made nylon polymer and fiber.—ALEX TULLO German industry fears Trump’s tariffs The business climate for Germany’s chemical and pharmaceutical industry cooled in April, according to VCI, the largest trade group of German chemical makers. “Business expectations have deteriorated noticeably,” and there is an expectation that it will deteriorate further in the coming months, VCI says in a press release. “The main cause of the feared setback is likely Donald Trump's aggressive and unpredictable US tariff policy,” the document says. About 7% of Germany’s chemical exports, worth about $11.4 billion, go to the US.—ALEX SCOTT DuPont names electronics business Qnity DuPont has filed a registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to spin off its electronic materials business in November; it will name the new company Qnity Electronics. Under DuPont, the businesses that make up Qnity had sales of $4.3 billion and pretax earnings of $1.3 billion in 2024. Some 57% of those sales were from materials used in semiconductor manufacturing, such as chemical mechanical planarization slurries and lithography chemicals. The rest of the business’s revenues come from materials used in electronic interconnects, such as thermal management systems.—ALEX TULLO BASF sells stakes in Chinese ventures More than a year after putting the assets up for sale, BASF has found a buyer for its stakes in two joint ventures in China’s Xinjiang region. Verde Chemical Singapore acquired the shares effective April 21 for an undisclosed sum. BASF disclosed its desire to sell the stakes in February 2024, after German news organizations published an expose alleging that employees from Xinjiang Markor Chemical Industry, BASF’s partner in the ventures, were involved in abuses of the Uyghur population in the region. The ventures produce butanediol and the derivative polytetrahydrofuran, a raw material for elastic fibers such as spandex.—MIKE MCCOY DePoly raises money and plans plant The Swiss recycling firm DePoly, one of C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch in 2024, has raised $23 million in seed funding and plans to start up a demonstration plant in Monthey, Switzerland, this year. DePoly is developing an alkaline hydrolysis technology, which also incorporates metal oxides and ultraviolet light, to break down polyethylene terephthalate into its raw materials: purified terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. DePoly’s plant will have 500 metric tons per year of capacity. Investors in DePoly include MassMutual Ventures, BASF Venture Capital, and Syensqo.—ALEX TULLO DyStar to close food coloring plant in Ohio The colorant maker DyStar has decided to close its manufacturing site in Cincinnati at the end of June. The firm acquired the facility in 2016. It make dyes for food, medicine, and cosmetics as well as oil-soluble pigments, dispersions, and specialty dyes. Dystar announced earlier this year that it will close its facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, and consolidate production in Reidsville, North Carolina.—CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN LG to build battery recycling plant in France LG Energy Solution and Derichebourg, a French metal recycler, are planning to build a battery recycling joint venture in northern France. The unit will dismantle and process about 200,000 metric tons of discarded batteries and battery scrap, largely from electric vehicles collected in France by Derichebourg and in Poland by LG. From this raw material the plant will produce black mass, a battery recycling intermediate. Further processing at other locations will extract lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other materials from the black mass as feedstocks for LG’s battery production.—CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN RepAir raises funds for carbon capture The carbon dioxide capture firm RepAir has raised $15 million in a series A funding round led by Taranis Carbon Ventures and Extantia Capital. The funding includes a $3 million grant from the government of Israel. RepAir is developing both point source and direct-air-capture systems based on a solvent-free electrochemical cycle that operates at a steady ambient temperature. It says the technology can pull CO 2 from dilute gas streams using just 30% of the energy of other types of carbon capture. The firm is targeting artificial intelligence computing centers as early customers because many are being powered by on-site natural-gas-fired turbines.—CRAIG BETTENHAUSEN Lotte opens ADC facility in Syracuse Lotte Biologics, a South Korean drug services firm, is kicking off operations at its Syracuse Bio Campus in New York. Lotte says it has agreed to manufacture clinical-stage antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs)—targeted cancer therapies—for its first client, an unnamed Asia-based biotechnology company, marking the contract development and manufacturing firm’s entry into ADC services. Lotte invested $100 million in the former Bristol Myers Squibb facility, which contains a conjugation reactor with capacity of up to 1,000 L.— AAYUSHI PRATAP Merck KGaA to buy SpringWorks Seeking to enhance its presence in cancer drugs and in the US, the German drug company Merck KGaA is buying the oncology biotech SpringWorks Therapeutics for $3.9 billion. SpringWorks launched out of Pfizer as a home for orphaned drug candidates. The firm brings a pipeline of possible cancer treatments, as well as Ogsiveo and Gomekli, two small-molecule drugs originally developed by Pfizer. The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year.—LAURA HOWES Novartis to buy oligo firm Regulus Novartis will buy the oligonucleotide start-up Regulus Therapeutics for $800 million up front. Shareholders may also receive milestone payments contingent on United States regulatory approval of Regulus's lead drug candidate, farabursen, that would make the deal worth $1.7 billion. Farabursen, which will enter Phase 3 trials in the third quarter of 2025, is an antisense oligonucleotide microRNA inhibitor meant to treat autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), the most common polycystic kidney disease. The condition causes painful cysts in the kidneys, and more than half of people diagnosed with ADPKD will progress to full kidney failure by the age of 70.—SARAH BRANER Lilly taps Creyon for AI-designed oligo deal Eli Lilly and Company has hired San Diego start-up Creyon Bio to discover and develop new oligonucleotide treatments. Lilly will pay Creyon $13 million up front and a potential $1 billion or more in milestone payments to design RNA-targeting drugs for a “broad range of diseases.” Neither company names specific disease areas, but the agreement involves multiple targets. Launched in 2022, Creyon uses artificial intelligence to design new drug candidates.—ROWAN WALRATH BUSINESS ROUNDUP Petrochemical Industries Company, based in Kuwait, has agreed to purchase a 25% stake in Wanhua Chemical (Yantai) Petrochemical from China’s Wanhua Chemical Group for $638 million. Another state oil company, Saudi Aramco, has also been inking deals with Chinese petrochemical makers, most notably buying a 10% stake in Rongsheng Petrochemical. Covestro has signed an 8-year contract to secure liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Ineos, which the German chemical maker will use as feedstock and energy source for its European operations. Ineos entered the LNG sector in 2022. Linde will construct an air separation unit at Samsung’s semiconductor foundry in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. The plant, scheduled to come online in mid-2026, will be Linde’s eighth at the site; it will supply ultra-high-purity argon, nitrogen, and oxygen for chipmaking processes. Syensqo and the Chinese chemical giant Sinopec have agreed to collaborate in advanced materials and specialty chemicals. The partners say they will seek to improve the sustainability of carbon fiber and composites, specialty polymers, and other materials for the aerospace, transportation, and energy sectors. BASF is building a plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany, for making ultrapure sulfuric acid for European customers that produce semiconductors. BASF plans to open the plant, which is expected to cost less than $100 million, in 2027. Ningbo Zhenhai Refining & Chemical, a subsidiary of Chinese Chinese chemical maker Sinopec, plans to build a 200,000-metric-ton-per-year facility for producing ethyl vinyl acetate and low-density polyethylene in Ningbo, China. US firm ECI Group is licensing its technology for the project.