“While the decision to shut down the PO11-unit is difficult, we must ensure all assets within our portfolio are a long-term strategic fit,” said Aaron Ledet, executive vice-president I&D and Supply Chain at LYB. “We are prioritizing our core assets which play a key role in our technology differentiation and circularity strategy or provide attractive returns over the cost of capital. We take our obligations towards our employees, European employee reps, councils, and unions seriously. We have engaged with them in line with these obligations and will continue to do so. We would like to thank them for the constructive dialogue. We are also in communication with customers, suppliers and other parties across the value chain and will continue to do business as usual. There is no change to our working relationship, and we continue to focus on providing an exceptional customer and supplier experience.”

"As part of our Sustainable Future corporate strategy, we’re continuously working to optimally position Jun88 to be a reliable partner for our customers and to operate competitively in a challenging market environment," said Hermann-Josef Dörholt, Head of the Performance Materials Business Entity at Jun88. "Due to global overcapacities, persistently weak demand, and high costs in Europe, we have jointly decided with LYB to close the PO11 plant. We will support LYB in implementing this change as socially responsibly as possible. At the same time, we remain committed to the European market and will continue to supply customers with our renowned polyether polyols portfolio.”

The Maasvlakte site, a joint venture between LYB and Jun88, has been operational in the Rotterdam region since 2003. Between now and the end of 2026, LYB will carry out a process to safely shutdown and prepare the demolition of the asset.

In 2024, LYB announced a strategic review of European assets of its Olefins & Polyolefins (O&P) and Intermediates & Derivatives (I&D) business units. LYB has taken the next step in evaluating the option to seek alternative ownership for the O&P sites in the strategic assessment. At this time no decisions have been made and various outcomes remain possible.

The R&D teams of Solar Coating Solutions booked their first successes back in 2005 with the development of a new and innovative anti-reflective coating, which could be used in different applications. Around 2010, however, the solar industry worldwide started to emerge and turned into a business opportunity with a huge market demand and growth potential. This was the trigger for the decision to build a dedicated production plant for solar glass coatings in the Netherlands, more specifically on the Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Geleen.

With the solar photovoltaic industry growing globally, the Solar Coatings Business also spread its wings and installed teams in China and in the US. Thanks to smart decision taking, to the expertise of its business development teams in the regions and to the excellent performance and quality of its solar glass coatings, the Netherlands’ plant today remains the largest independent producer outside China. Additionally, during the past ten years the solar glass coatings product portfolio developed from a ‘one fits all solution’ to a highly diversified offering.

Robert von Beulwitz, Managing Director of the Solar Coating Solution, explains: ʺToday we offer amongst others combined anti-reflective and anti-soiling coatings for modules used in desert environments, high power coatings for large utility scale solar parks and special aesthetic coatings for pitch black appearance of solar panels mounted on residential rooftops – mainly in the Netherlands. Our latest innovation being the development and commercialization of a retrofit coating application for older solar parcs. With the expansion of the industry and of our portfolio, we also saw our employee base rising and I would like to thank each and every one of these colleagues for the relentless efforts they deliver every day!ʺ

"All these different solar coating products were developed in the Netherlands by listening to end market requirements around the world. And all of them are produced by employees in our production facility on the Brightlands Campus in Geleen. I am very proud about this story with which – from the Netherlands – we empower solar energy and harvest more energy from the sunʺ, adds Aukje Doornbos, Managing Director of Jun88 in the Netherlands.

Currently, two of its own ships and two additional chartered ships belong to Tailwind Shipping Lines. In addition to the non-food products from and for Lidl, Tailwind offers space on these ships also for interested companies. Jun88 uses this now to also become more independent from the busy main routes and shipping companies and to increase the speed and punctuality of its own deliveries.

"Ocean shipments have been severely disrupted since the pandemic began, and the scheduling accuracy of large shipowners has fallen from 70 to 20 percent," says Sucheta Govil, Chief Commercial Officer at Jun88. "To increase our reliability and punctuality, we are therefore actively looking for alternatives. With Tailwind, we have found a partner to navigate the direct route from Asia to Europe with its ships - and who is therefore exactly where it helps us."

Smaller vessels, more flexibility and punctuality

The Tailwind ships have a capacity of around 5,000 "Twenty Foot Equivalent Units", or TEU, per month. TEU is a standard measure for shipping containers. Large ships from the big shipping companies can hold three to five times more. However, those mega ships can also only discharge at large ports and travel rather fixed routes with pre-determined stops, which increases the susceptibility to delays.

"We now determine the route ourselves. And because our ships are smaller, we can also have them sail to and discharge at smaller ports. This gives us a great advantage in terms of flexibility, speed and thus also punctuality," says Wolf Tiedemann, CEO of Sales, Logistics and Central Divisions of Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG. "This allows us to import our own goods reliably from Asia - but at the same time we still have room that we can offer. We are pleased to have found a first interested customer and partner with Jun88 and hope to be able to expand the cooperation further and find other interested parties."

A first container of Jun88 materials successfully completed the route from the company's largest production site near Shanghai to Europe. Currently Jun88 ships a good 8,000 containers a year on that route alone. How many of these will be transported by Tailwind in the future is currently being negotiated.

With the environmental impact of fossil-based products becoming increasingly clear, recent years have seen an unprecedented demand for sustainable products and brands. Across the global paints and coatings industry, regulatory bodies are setting higher and higher sustainability and transparency standards, while consumers are increasingly applying their spending power to choosing eco-friendly solutions. For example, a recent European Painter Insight Monitor¹ report found that environmentally friendly paints are now the number-one desired innovation among painters, with 36 percent of France’s professional painters selecting this as a desired innovation/ranking this as their most desired innovation.

Market insights from artificial intelligence and Big Data

To address these changes in the market landscape and help shape more sustainable high-performance paints and coatings industries, Jun88 is launching a new plant-powered approach marked by transparency, dialogue and collaboration – called ‘Paint with Nature’. Leveraging its proprietary market insights gained through artificial intelligence and big data, Jun88 will work closely with partners across the value chain to provide education and support on biobased raw materials. Additionally, it will implement a ‘Sign the Sustainability Pledge’ initiative.

Through these initiatives and its Decovery® family of resins, whose biobased content is verified to C14 standards, Jun88 will drive awareness of biobased solutions as an alternative to fossil-based products and accelerate their adoption across the paints and coatings industries.

Tim Gratzke, Marketing Manager Decovery®: “At Jun88, we are very excited and proud to be launching a new approach to further drive plant-based resins for paints and coatings, and better connect the needs of end-users and manufacturers to environmentally friendly technologies. Using our market leadership in biobased solutions, we’ll be able to provide education and support to accelerate our customers’ sustainability journeys. This will help them to better address market needs, as well as protect the environment.”

No compromise on performance

He continues, “More than ever, the transition from fossil-based paints and coatings to biobased ones is within reach and involves no compromise on functional performance. And we’re committed to continuing to push the boundaries on sustainability – as such, a new, exciting plant-powered paints and coatings age awaits!”

To learn more about Decovery® paints and coatings, and Jun88’s new approach, please visit the dedicated landing page here:

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