Imperial Chemical Industries
| Imperial Chemical Industries
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Public Limited Company |
| founding | 1926 |
| resolution | 2007 |
| Reason for dissolution | Busting |
| Seat |
London , UK
|
| Number of employees | approx. 32,000 |
| sales | 5.8 billion pounds (2005) |
| Branch | chemical industry |
Imperial Chemical Industries ( ICI ) was a British chemical company based in London . Most recently, ICI manufactured paints and specialty chemical products (including food ingredients , specialty polymers , electronic materials, fragrances and flavorings ). ICI employed approximately 32,000 people and had 2005 sales of over £ 5.8 billion.
In 2007, ICI was taken over by Akzo Nobel for 8.05 billion pounds (around twelve billion euros) and broken up. Shortly afterwards, parts that accounted for around 25% of sales were sold to Henkel .
For a long time in the 20th century, ICI was generally considered a leader in the UK. The phrase " the chairman of ICI " has been colloquially considered a leading figure in British business life. However, ICI's unique status has steadily declined over the past few decades and its unique prestige is now gone. Most recently, ICI was just a midsize company in the global chemical industry, an unfashionable industry with low returns and low growth prospects. It was one of the smaller constituents of the UK FTSE 100 index , far smaller than its former subsidiary AstraZeneca . In Germany ICI was well known through its subsidiaries ICI Paints and Ilford ; the latter belonged to the British chemical giant until 1989.
ICI had a few well-known brands (which are now part of Akzo Nobel):
- Dulux for wall paints and painting tools,
- Xyladecor and Consolan for wood preservatives,
- Hammerite for metal protective paints,
- Molto for fillers, adhesives and special cleaning agents and solvents.
history
ICI was founded in December 1926 as a merger of four companies, Brunner-Mond, Nobel Explosives, the United Alkali Company and the British Dyestuffs Corporation. In competition with the American DuPont and the German IG Farben (which were broken up again into the Hoechst , BASF and Bayer AG paint works after the Second World War ), the new company produced explosives , fertilizers , insecticides , dyes , industrial chemicals , printing materials and varnishes . Its sales were £ 27 million in its first year.
ICI played a key role in the development of new products including the dye phthalocyanine (1929), the acrylic plastic polymethyl methacrylate (1932), developed together with DuPont Dulux -Farben (1932), polyethylene (1937), the first sulfonamide - antibiotic sulfamethazine , the antimalarial drug Paludrine (1940), the synthetic fiber Terylene (1941, which was marketed in Germany under the name Diolen by the Glanzstoffwerke ), the phosphoric acid ester VX (1950), the inhalation anesthetic halothane (1951), the beta-blocker Inderal (1965), often Tamoxifen (1978) and the high-quality thermoplastic polyetherketone (1979) used in breast cancer .
The metal division, ICI Metals Division, was formed in 1962 as the subsidiary Imperial Metal Industries and floated on the stock exchange in 1962, initially with Imperial Chemical Industries as the main shareholder. In 1978 Imperial Metal Industries became independent from Imperial Chemical Industries.
One of its main production sites was in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England . Between 1971 and 1988 ICI operated a small research nuclear reactor of the type TRIGA Mark I, which was built by General Atomics .
Because of its great success as a pharmaceutical company , it founded ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1957. In 1971 ICI took over the US company Atlas Chemical Industries , which later operated under the name ICI America Inc. In 1987, ICI took over the SES company and thus entered into the breeding of sugar beet seeds. At the end of the 1980s the most important British chemical company got into a crisis and carried out mass layoffs. Also from the more common in the UK than a century, salary-related occupational pension scheme rose from ICI after due to new accounting standards a shortfall of 450 million pounds has been revealed.
In 1993 the company management decided to spin off the Pharma Bioscience branch from the chemical business. Pharmaceutical , agrochemical , specialty chemical and biological products were in a newly formed company called Zeneca introduced Group, operating under the CIO David Barnes became independent and in 1999 with the Swedish company Astra AB to Astra Zeneca merged , one of the largest pharmaceutical companies worldwide. In the 1990s, the chemical company ICI also moved away from the bulk of industrial chemicals to specialty chemicals in the hope that this would make its business less cyclical, more profitable and offer greater long-term growth opportunities. Nevertheless, its financial performance is still erratic and its share price development is volatile .
In 1997 ICI sold its Australian subsidiary ICI Australia, which has operated under the name Orica since 1998 . In 2002 ICI sold its 30 percent stake to the Huntsman Corporation . In 2003 there were reports that ICI was planning to sell its American adhesives and starch producer National Starch , which, with 9700 employees and sales of 2.8 billion euros, contributed 30 percent to total sales of the ICI Group. Instead, in 2006, the Cimsec tile adhesive and grout business was sold to Henkel, which ICI used to repay debt, similar to previous sales.
On August 13, 2007 it was announced that Akzo Nobel would take over ICI for around 12 billion euros. At the same time, the Adhesives and Electronic Materials divisions were sold on to Henkel for 4 billion euros.
In 2008, Henkel acquired the “Adhesives and Electronic Materials” (National Starch) businesses from ICI from Akzo Nobel for around 3.7 billion euros.
In the spring of 2014, in the largest sale of pension obligations to date, with a transaction value of 3.6 billion pounds, these were transferred to Legal & General and Prudential plc .
literature
- WJ Reader: Imperial Chemical Industries - A History, Volume I: The Forerunners 1870-1926. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press 1970, ISBN 0-19-215937-2 .
- WJ Reader: Imperial Chemical Industries - A History, Volume II: The First Quarter Century 1926–1952. London / New York / Toronto: Oxford University Press 1975, ISBN 0-19-215944-5 .
- Coleman, Kim: IG Farben and ICI, 1925–53: Strategies for Growth and Survival. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006, ISBN 0-230-00329-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chemical fusion perfect: Akzo Nobel buys ICI. In: Handelsblatt . August 13, 2007, accessed June 9, 2016 .
- ^ Grace's Guide to British Industrial History: ICI Metals Division
- ^ ICI Pension Fund agrees £ 3.6bn buy-in with L&G and Prudential. In: pensionsage.com. March 26, 2014, accessed June 9, 2016 .
- ↑ Review: Salsbury, Stephen: Imperial Chemical Industries - A History, Volume I. In: Business History Review, Vol. 45 (1971), No. 3, pp. 403-406.
- ↑ Review: Haber, LF: Imperial Chemical Industries - A History, Volume II. In: Business History Review, Jg. 50 (1976), No. 3, pp. 418-419.
- ↑ Review: Grünbacher, Armin: Review: Kim Coleman, IG Farben and ICI, 1925-53. In: European History Quarterly, Vol. 40 (2010), No. 1, pp. 120–121.