Kuraray: Company Intro Welcome Video

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Hello. I'm George Avdey, President of Kuraray America. And I want to welcome each and every one of you here to this brief introduction to our company, Kuraray and Kuraray America. Kuraray has been an innovative company since its beginning in 1926, when it started as a rayon manufacturing company in Kurashiki, Japan. Today, Kuraray is close to a $5 billion global specialty chemical, polymer, and film company, meeting the needs of industrial consumers, as well as regular consumers like, you and I. Over the years, Kuraray has had to find ways to innovate its way towards growth. So they embarked upon developing new applications for PVOH, polyvinyl alcohol. And Kuraray's trademark name for PVOH is POVAL. And during this time, we developed innovative copolymers of polyvinyl alcohol for inkjet paper, as the computer industry was rapidly developing and for a new emerging market for liquid crystal displays. Now, all of us are familiar with liquid crystal display televisions that we have today. But in the 1970s, it all started with a small watch with a few square millimeters of polarizing film made by Kuraray. And today, this is one of Kuraray's largest businesses. In the early 1980s, Kuraray realized that in order to be a global chemical company, it had to expand its production capabilities into the United States. It established the first EVAL EVOH plant in Pasadena, Texas in 1986. In 25 short years, we have now expanded our capabilities in the United States to include 3 plants and the acquisition of MonoSol. So in 25 years, Kuraray has gone from 10,000 tons of EVOH to 48,000 tons of EVOH. In 2000, we built the first thermoplastic elastomers plant, SEPTON, a 10,000 ton-a-year plant. Today, it is 23,000 tons a year. Currently, we are completing the construction of a 40,000 ton POVAL PVOH plant in Laporte, Texas to be completed in October of 2014. So you can see that Kuraray is continuing to invest more money and more faith in the people here in Kuraray America, as we build our vinyl acetate chain around the world. Our current president is Fumio Ito and he has a dream. And his dream is by 2018 that we would grow Kuraray sales globally to $10 billion, and that we would expand our vinyl acetate operations around the world, and that we would develop a foundation of highly skilled people to safely sustain this growth, not only for this generation of people who are working at Kuraray but for future generations. So I want to thank you for spending your time with me here today. And I encourage all of you to join us enthusiastically as we build on this dream. Thank you.