| Nissan Chemical Industries, Ltd. is pleased to announce a license agreement with Ormecon, GmbH, based on which Nissan Chemical started intensive worldwide marketing activity for certain ORMECONTM products. The agreement has been signed in January 2004 and allows Nissan Chemical to sell Ormecon’s conductive polymer (Organic Metal polyaniline) dispersion for certain Energy Devices. The agreement includes a Research and Development service contract. Ormecon has basic worldwide ICP (Intrinsically Conductive Polymer) synthesis and dispersion patents and already commercialised several products by using special polyaniline (PAni) dispersions. Ormecon’s PAni dispersions are of transparent green color, and contain nano sized Organic Metal particles in a dispersion medium (e.g. water or various organic solvents). The maximum conductivity exceeds 200 S/cm at this time and Ormecon is trying to go even further beyond. Many companies are interested in Ormecon’s PAni dispersions. At this time, Nissan and Ormecon focus on certain energy device applications such as Condenser, Capacitor and battery in their collaboration based on the license and R&D agreement. Both parties intend to expand their collaboration to other applications, for example anti-static, electromagnetic shielding or special electrode applications. Condenser and supercapacitor markets are considered to become highly performing energy storage devices for appliance and motor vehicle, and there is no doubt that this is a growing business field. Nissan and Ormecon have recently achieved some significant breakthrough for the manufacturing of extremely well performing supercapacitors and are in the process of evaluating this new technology in depth. Nissan Chemical plans to import Ormecon’s polyaniline predispersions from Germany and intends to practise the final production steps at Nissan’s own plant. In the future, the parties may combine Nissan’s own organic conductive materials such as Aminoquinoxaline or its derivative(s) and is going to expand organic conductive materials business. Already Nissan Chemical commercialised inorganic transparent conductive material as Celnax® for anti-static, UV/IR and another potential applications. As a result, Nissan Chemical got a significant business in anti-static applications and very positive responses for their UV/IR blocking application. Recently Nissan decided to expand manufacturing capacity of Celnax which is now under construction at Sodegaura Plant (Chiiba, Japan). Taking this opportunity, Nissan Chemical has targeted more than US $ 30 millions sales at 2010 as conductive materials business by combining both organic and inorganic conductive materials. |