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Two Chinese newcomers make the ranking: TongKun Group at 48 and Hengyi Petrochemical at 50. Both are polyester producers that make their own raw materials. Hengyi also has a large, integrated nylon 6 business. Both companies join similar Chinese firms, like Hengli Petrochemical and Rongsheng Petrochemical. All these companies have been building massive complexes for aromatics and derivatives, in many cases swamping entire segments of the chemical industry—such as purified terephthalic acid—with new capacity that is well beyond the scale of players outside China.

The polyurethane specialist Covestro unveiled a plan late last year to cut up to 1,700 jobs—about 10% of its workforce—by the end of 2023. Most of the cuts will be in Germany. At the same time, the company is resuscitating a plan to build a world-scale methylene diphenyl diisocyanate plant by 2026. While the previous plan pinpointed Texas as the site of the complex, Covestro now says it may build it in either the US or China. The company is also increasing capacity for another polyurethane raw material, toluene diisocyanate, in Dormagen, Germany. And with the biotechnology firm Genomatica, Covestro plans to make biobased hexamethylenediamine, used in the manufacture of polyurethanes and nylon 6,6.

A Rongsheng Petrochemical subsidiary, Zhejiang Petroleum & Chemical, started up the second phase of its massive refining and petrochemical complex in Zhejiang, China, in 2021. With capacity now doubled, the facility can process 40 million metric tons (t) of oil per year. The facility has a large petrochemical output: up to 6.6 million t of aromatics and 1.4 million t of ethylene per year. The expansion allowed the company to start making specialized polymers, such as acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene and polycarbonate.

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21.Weng J, Wang Y, Li J, Shen Q, Zhang R. Enhanced root colonization and biocontrol activity of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens SQR9 by abrB gene disruption. Applied microbiology and biotechnology. 2012; 97(19):8823–30. pmid:23196984

35.Luo CP, Zhou HF, Zou JC, Wang XY, Zhang RS, Xiang YP, et al. Bacillomycin L and surfactin contribute synergistically to the phenotypic features of Bacillus subtilis 916 and the biocontrol of rice sheath blight induced by Rhizoctonia solani. Applied microbiology and biotechnology. 2015; 99(4):1897–910. pmid:25398282.

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The microarray data have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and are accessible through GEO series accession number GSE87740.

National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.​gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc​=GSE87740 The R Project for Statistical Computing: https://www.r-project.org

The microarray data have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus database and are accessible through GEO series accession number GSE87740.Funding: N. Marquez is CONICET fellow and thanks ANPCyT and BEC.AR program, Argentina.