Community Insight - SpecialChem 4 Adhesives

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Adhesives & Sealants Trends Analysis

Our industry experts regularly analyze the evolution of SpecialChem Members preferences and share with you unique aggregated data!
Our ever-growing community and unique position in the market allow us to have exclusive insight on key information our members share with us, such as the performances they seek or the markets they serve.

Below you will find a list of Community Insights.

Focus of the month

Radiation-cured Adhesives’ Appeal is Holding Fast
February, 2012

PCs and cellphones may be almost everywhere today, but their rapid growth through the 1990s owed much to radiation-cured adhesives. That electronics industry boom saw numerous new specifically UV-curing adhesives introduced to help ramp-up mass production. Today, UV and visible light-cured adhesives are an important technology in electronics manufacturing, and also play a big role in medical device assembly

Past Community Insights

	January, 2012 - Manufacturers Underline Sealants' Active Role As sealants are typically dispensed and left for years at a time, an average user can easily forget their main purpose until it's too late. In fact, as these products combine many functions, different people have different needs from their sealants. You might therefore argue that it's up to the user to define what that main purpose actually is. To know which specifications they should optimize first, sealant formulators must ask their customers what properties they value most and ensure their products deliver it, even if the users don't think about them after they've been applied.

	December, 2011 - Tackifier Constraints Provide an Economic Lesson "Fracking" has been blamed for some US citizens having water that they can ignite, and with causing earthquakes in the UK. Also known as hydraulic fracturing, fracking has dramatically affected the adhesive industry too, even if those effects don't grab headline news quite as much. Used increasingly widely, the technique used to recover "shale gas" has driven refineries in the US to shorter carbon-chain cracking inputs.

	November, 2011 - Formulators Prefer Innovation Support From Material Suppliers There are many problems to solve when formulating adhesives. Firstly, the amount of money an adhesive company has to invest in vital research is always limited. Then raw material costs get too high, but users may move to rival products if a company passes those costs on. Increasing customer demands push companies to formulate new products, while at the same time they must often adapt to new restrictions on the raw materials they use. It's fair to say that, as they'll be asked to solve all of these problems, pressure on adhesive formulators comes from all sides. So what options are available on a limited budget?

	October, 2011 - Emission Fears Drive Shift Away from Urea-formaldehyde Wood Adhesives Urea-formaldehyde adhesives are so effective and economical at producing wood composites and laminates that they have dominated this application since being introduced over 50 years ago. Yet emissions of formaldehyde from composite wood products are increasingly being limited, driven by a gradual realization of the harm exposure to these vapours can cause people. Restrictions like those imposed by the California Air Resources Board are gradually reducing the level of permitted formaldehyde emissions. Consequently, adhesives manufacturers need to help affected customers meet these regulations, or resign themselves to the likely loss of business.

	September, 2011 - When Customers Speak, Adhesive Makers Listen Offering the right product is critical for any business – but how do organisations decide which ones to commercialize? The adhesive industry spawned one of the classic product that we never knew we needed, in the form of a certain famous movable stationery product. Those repositionable notes, as the first of their kind, reaped great rewards, an example that would seem tempting to mimic. Yet, when Specialchem4Adhesives asked its readers as to what the most important factor usually is when launching a new product, the answers shows that the adhesive industry would want to know if it already has customers even before entering a virgin market...

	August, 2011 - Oil Price Pullbacks Yet to Calm Troubled Raw Material Waters Suppliers of raw materials used in the adhesive industry have typically enjoyed healthy profitability improvements this year, but supplies of many of their products remain tight. Meanwhile crude oil prices have fallen back from the $115/barrel highs seen in late April, even if they are still hovering around $100/barrel. Both oil prices and upstream profitability seem encouraging news for monomers and polymers used in adhesives overwhelming derived from petrochemical resources.

	July, 2011 - Adhesive Industry Eyes Turn to Asia Should adhesive manufacturers prioritise selling products into sectors that are growing rapidly, even if that means that they are currently expanding from a low total level of demand? Or should they target high-value markets, even if they are more mature and growing less slowly? Employees must decide whether to go for rapid growth or a large market into both if they're at the head of a business, and further down the organisation.

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