Producer
Kemira
Finnish water treatment and paper chemicals company. Major global ferric chloride producer; expanded Tarragona, Spain facility in 2024 for growing biogas/phosphorus-removal demand. 63 manufacturing sites globally.
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Goods downstream
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Facilities
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Stories
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2 inputs Kemira supplies
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Did you know2024
Kemira's ferric chloride (FeCl₃) production serves two entirely separate industries from the same product: (1) printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing, where ferric chloride solution is the standard etchant for removing unwanted copper from PCB blanks in electronics assembly; and (2) municipal drinking water and wastewater treatment, where ferric chloride and ferric sulfate are the dominant iron-based coagulants used to remove suspended solids, phosphorus, and organic matter from water. Electronics manufacturers (PCB fabricators in Taiwan, China, the US) and municipal water utilities (city waterworks, sewage treatment plants) both depend on Kemira's ferric iron chemistry supply chain — one to make circuit boards, one to make drinking water safe. A ferric chloride shortage or HCl feedstock disruption would simultaneously threaten electronics manufacturing capacity and municipal water treatment quality, with no awareness between the two industries that they share a common critical supplier.
Kemira Oyj ↗Origin2024
Kemira was founded in 1920 in Helsinki as a Finnish state-owned enterprise primarily producing fertilizers and industrial chemicals for Finland's agricultural and forestry sectors. For most of the 20th century, Kemira was a classic state-owned chemicals conglomerate — sulfuric acid, superphosphate fertilizers, nitrogen compounds, industrial explosives (via subsidiary Forcit), and pigments (titanium dioxide). The company was partially privatized and listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1994. Between 2000 and 2010, Kemira executed a strategic transformation — divesting or spinning off all businesses that were not water treatment or pulp/paper chemicals — ending up as a focused specialty chemicals supplier to water infrastructure and paper manufacturing. Today, a company that began as a government-owned fertilizer producer is the world's third-largest supplier of water treatment coagulants, with 63 manufacturing sites globally and chemicals running through the water systems of hundreds of cities.
Kemira Oyj ↗Concentration2024
Kemira, Solenis (formerly Ashland Water Technologies), and Nouryon (formerly AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals) are the three dominant global suppliers of water treatment chemicals and paper process chemicals — an oligopoly that controls the chemistry underlying global municipal water infrastructure AND the entire global paper and packaging supply chain. These three companies' chemicals are present in the water purification systems of most major cities globally, in the paper mills that produce cardboard packaging for Amazon and food companies, and in the industrial cooling water systems of power plants and refineries. None of these companies are household names; all three operate outside public awareness despite their infrastructure criticality. Kemira alone has ~€3.5-4B in annual revenue and 63 manufacturing sites — a global chemicals supplier of comparable scale to well-known specialty chemical companies, with essentially zero consumer brand recognition.
Kemira Oyj ↗