Producer
DIC Corporation / Sun Chemical
World's largest printing-ink maker (Sun Chemical is its subsidiary); vertically integrated into pigments (acquired Clariant pigments).
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Inputs supplied
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Goods downstream
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Facilities
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Stories
What they make
1 input DIC Corporation / Sun Chemical supplies
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Goods downstream
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What else they do
Business segments
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Printing Inks (Sun Chemical)
Color & Pigments
Performance & Functional Materials
Intelligence
What's known
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Did you know2024
Almost every printed and packaged thing a person sees in a day carries color from one company. DIC Corporation, through its subsidiary Sun Chemical, is the world's largest maker of printing inks — the inks on food and consumer packaging, magazines, books, labels and newspapers across the globe. And it didn't stop at ink: DIC vertically integrated into the upstream colorant itself, becoming one of the largest makers of organic pigments (notably by acquiring BASF's pigments business in 2021). Those same pigments don't only go into ink — they color plastics, paints, coatings and cosmetics too. So a single, low-profile Japanese chemicals company supplies both the pigment and the ink behind an enormous share of the color humans actually encounter, from the cereal box to the magazine cover to the colored plastic of a product. The world is, to a surprising degree, printed and tinted in DIC's colors.
DIC Corporation ↗Concentration2024
The printing-ink and organic-pigment industries are far more concentrated than the riot of color on store shelves would suggest. A handful of players — DIC/Sun Chemical, Flint Group, Siegwerk — supply most of the world's packaging and publication inks, and DIC's move to absorb a major pigments business pushed concentration upstream into the colorant itself. Because inks and pigments must be precisely color-matched and qualified into a brand's packaging and printing process, switching suppliers is disruptive, which entrenches the incumbents. As with paperboard, fasteners and foam elsewhere in this radar, an everyday, foundational material — here, the color on packaging and print — turns out to rest on a small set of specialist chemical firms whose capacity and pricing quietly shape the entire printing and packaging economy. (Note: a separate DIC Corporation entry in this dataset covers the same company's specialty-materials and spirulina-pigment businesses.)
DIC Corporation ↗