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9. NIPPON PAINT
Osaka, Japan
Phone: 81-6-6458-1111
Web site: www.nipponpaint.co.jp
Key Figures:
Number of employees: 6,000
Established: 1881
Coatings Sales: 2.266 billion
Coatings Sales: 381m liters
Proportion of the various parts:
Coating material: 95%, fine chemicals: 5%
Executive Team:
Hiroshi FujiŁ¬representative director, chairman; Teruyoshi FujishimaŁ¬representative director, president and Shizuo Katsunaga, representative director, executive vice president.
Major Products:
AutomotiveŁ¬protective, architectural, marine and industrial paint and coatings.
Scratch Guard Coat
Market Positioning:
Nippon Paint acquired Rohm and Haas Company's automotive coatings business, and made plans to introduce NB Coatings, Inc. to serve North American customers.
Nippon Paint purchased the wholly-owned? Rohm and Haas business in North America and Rohm and Haas' 50% share of the companies' joint ventures, Morton Nippon Coatings in North America and Nippon Bee Chemical in Japan. This purchase and introduction of NB Coatings unites the decade-long partnering organizations under one strategy to create a leading position in the North American plastic automotive coatings market.
Commentary:
Nippon Paint also partnered with Nissan Motor Co. and together developed the world's first clear paint that repairs scratches on painted car surfaces.
Scratch Guard Coat contains a newly developed high elastic resin that helps prevent scratches from affecting the inner layers of a car's painted surface. With Scratch Guard Coat a car's scratched surface will return to its original state anywhere from one day to a week, depending on temperature and the depth of the scratch, according to the company.
The water-repellent paint also has a higher resistance to scratches compared with conventional clear paints, the company also said. For example, a vehicle painted with Scratch Guard Coat will have only one-fifth the abrasions caused by a car washing machine compared with a car covered with conventional clear paint.
Scratch Guard Coat is effective for about three years and will be offered only in some Japan models of the X-Trail sport-utility vehicle, planned for sale soon; overseas plans are still undecided.
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