86 Business View - October 2015
ing the market for new products. We let our customers do
that work. We have eight engineers on staff, three chem-
ists, eight managers, and the balance of the employees
are chemical operators, mechanics, shipping clerks, lab
technicians, and office staff. We do have a very strong
focus on engineering, because we do scale-up work. If
a new product is developed in a lab elsewhere, and a
company wants to commercialize it, we do that kind of
work. We’ll scale it up in the plant and help develop the
first commercial process.”
In addition to NFC’s production expertise, changes in
the global marketplace over the last several years have
helped propel the company into its current, leading posi-
tion as a manufacturer of specialty chemicals, interme-
diates, and value-added products. Dickson recounts the
shifting dynamics: “Let’s go back about 15 years,” he
says. “Many of the manufacturers for basic chemicals
and intermediates – the building blocks – were moving
to China and India and being sold in the market for much
less. So there was a mass exodus from the US of some
chemical intermediates, especially in the dye industry. In
the past, we had made a lot of dyes here, but the dye in-
dustry is now almost extinct in the USA. There were many
closures of small, middle, and large chemical companies
in that line of work, and, of course, the textile industry
left. Many of textile chemicals, including dyes and a lot of
other finishing chemicals, went offshore, so there was a
great reduction in domestic capacity.”
However, over the last several years, the situation has
been changing. While about 50 percent of NFC’s chemi-
cal building blocks still come from China and India, com-
panies that have spent years working on new technolo-
gies for manufacturing value-added products based on
those raw materials were loathe to open plants in China.
They feared, for example, that their trade secrets would
be stolen. In addition, the government of China has been
closing down chemical plants lately because of runaway
pollution. This action has caused a shortage of certain
intermediates.
MANUFACTURING
