Stepan announces Q2 price rises

Stepan Europe has announced Quarter 2 price increases for all European Stepanpol aromatic polyester polyols of EUR 100 per tonne.

Roger Stubbs, Vice President European Polymers, for Stepan commented: “This increase has been driven by higher raw material costs and in particular by the volatile cost of DEG [di-ethylene glycol] which has increased by over 30 % since the end of last year and we cannot foresee a short term reversal in this trend.

Maintaining our competitive position and delivering self-formulation value benefits remains core to our service philosophy and in support of these we cannot continue to suffer margin erosion as a result of such large increases in raw material costs.

We will maintain our competitive position in the market as demonstrated by our continuing investment in manufacturing capacity to expand our plant at Wesseling [Köln, Germany] to more than double our annual European production capacity to 120,000 t. In support of this we are actively increasing our technical capability by recruiting specialists with specific sector expertise to bring focused value support to our customers operations.”