Cabot breaks ground on Indonesian expansion

Cabot Corporation has broken ground on its carbon black capacity expansion project in Cilegon, Indonesia. This phase of the project will add approximately 80,000 metric tons of additional annual production capacity and is expected to be completed in 2021.

Cabot says that the new capacity from this project will provide a reliable, local, high-quality supply to serve the increasing carbon black demand in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia, which is growing at 4-5% per year.The expansion in Cilegon is part of a larger global capacity expansion and de-bottlenecking project, announced in May 2018. Cabot has already made progress toward its stated goal of expanding global carbon black manufacturing capacity by 300,000 metric tons and will have reached this goal upon commissioning the expansion in Indonesia, the company says. This capacity increase is enabling Cabot to support the growth of its tire, industrial rubber and specialty carbons customers worldwide.

In recent years, China's tire companies transfers its tire production capacity to South East Asia. With more and more China's new tire factories built up, other related industries like carbon black、steel cord also need more capacity to satisfy growing demand.

Not long ago, Xingda Steel Cord has put its Thailand factory into operation to satisfy the local companies' demand.