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SPONSORED CONTENT: Optima Chemical

21st August 2019

Submitted by:

Andrew Warmington

At Optima Chemical, typically our first words to you are ‘Welcome, how can we help you’. If there is one thing that epitomises Optima, it is a commitment to truly serve our customers and it runs deep, through every level of the organisation. We believe it is the key to our growth from the company that offered a single product almost 30 years ago to what we are today, a full-service chemical company with the infrastructure to take ideas through to delivered products and solutions.

Optima today has an engineering skill-set that enables us to manufacture high-energy and high-hazard, sensitive chemistry safely at scale at two US-based manufacturing plants, where we manufacture for our contract partners as well as own products. Our laboratories are run by a team that offers technical support to our contract manufacturing partners as well as analytical development, route development and scale-up for other customers, be it for custom-made products or some short-term use of our facilities. Underpinning all of this is a culture of safety, service and flexibility.

The single product that we first offered 30 years ago was sodium tetraphenyl borate; we handled magnesium and made our own Grignards. We still do this today, but the business has evolved and grown. We handle many metals now, make many organometallics and have our own product lines that stem from this technology platform.

One of our key products is used as an intermediate for a recently launched new drug and in 2018 Optima rose to the challenge of a twelve-fold increase in its manufacturing throughput. We delivered this within a year, under the pressure of actual production for the customer.

On the contract manufacturing side, 2019 has seen us rise to the challenge of helping a new blue-chip customer to launch their latest innovative technology to the consumer market. Working closely with our customer, we took the project from process development through to commercial production within ten months. Significant investment from Optima enabled this to happen. The expectation is for further growth over the next few years.

The significant organic growth we have experienced over the last few years has been fueled by investment in our plant at Douglas, Georgia (pictured), and the acquisition of additional plant at Belle, West Virginia, from DuPont at the end of 2015. Our overall reactor capacity now stands at approximately 100,000 gallons (380 m3). In parallel to the plant investment projects, we designed and built a new headquarters in 2019. Based at the Douglas site, the new building is two-storey, 16,000 ft2 (1,486 m2) and designed to be a collaborative space that is an efficient working environment for teams. It goes without saying that we delivered this project in less than 12 months too.

CONTACT

US
Doug Cochran
VP Business Development
Optima Chemicals Group
+1 980 219 1333
dcochran@optimachem
www.optimachem.com

EUROPE
Mike Harrison
Product Development
Optima Chemicals Group
+44 7570 985995
[email protected]
www.optimachem.com

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