The story
Founded by Camille Dreyfus in 1918, in New York City.1
In 1918, the American Cellulose & Chemical Manufacturing Company (known as Amcelle) was founded in New York City by Swiss chemist Camille Dreyfus. The American Cellulose and Chemical Manufacturing Co. Ltd plant in Cumberland, Maryland, originated in 1918 during World War I to produce cheaper fabric for airplane manufacturing.
The plant location was chosen inland to protect against potential Zeppelin attacks. It was also situated in proximity to a ready source of water at the Potomac River and easy access to coal supplies and railroad lines. After a series of delays, production began on Christmas Day, 1924 with a series of cellulose acetate commercial fabrics and yarns intended as alternatives to silk.
The plant closed in 1983, and was later torn down to provide a space for a new state prison. The company introduced the word "Celanese", a combination of "cellulose" and "ease" in 1925, seeking to promote the ease of cleaning and care of their acetate yarn, or artificial silk, fabrics. They officially took this name in 1927, becoming Celanese Corporation of America.
After World War II
In 1947, Celanese started producing acetate fiber at its plant near Ocotlán, Jalisco, Mexico. This plant closed in 2019. By 1958, Celanese had 13 domestic plants, three research and development centers, some 30 groups of products, and approximately 13,000 employees.
In 1959, Celanese commissioned Edward Durell Stone, a 20th-century American architect, to build the "Celanese House", a model home in New Canaan, Connecticut, to showcase the company's new materials and styles.
Celanese bought certain operations of the British chemicals firm Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1982. This included the Fiber Industries Incorporated plant in Salisbury, North Carolina, which became part of Invista in 2004.
In 1983, Celanese built a $20 million plant in Rock Hill, South Carolina, to produce polybenzimidazole (PBI), a material used to fabricate high-performance protective apparel used in firefighters' gear and astronaut space suits. Celanese spun off its pharmaceutical business as Celgene in 1986. In 1987, Hoechst AG acquired Celanese Corporation and merged it with its American subsidiary, American Hoechst, to form Hoechst Celanese Corporation. In 1989, Hoechst Celanese moved to buy out the remaining shareholders of Hoechst Celanese Canada and thus to fully privatize the Canadian unit in a deal worth $210 million. In 1998, in a $2.7 billion deal, Hoechst Celanese sold its Trevira division to a consortium between Houston-based KoSa, a joint venture of Koch Industries, IMASAB S.A., and Grupo Xtra, both of Mexico. Also in 1998, Hoechst combined most of its industrial-chemical operations into a new company, Celanese AG. In 1999, Hoechst spun off Celanese AG as a publicly-traded German corporation, cross-listed on both the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges as "CZZ" and "CZ", respectively. This was done in a vast corporate restructuring associated with the parent's merger with Rhone-Poulenc.
2000- present
On December 16, 2003, the U.S. private-equity firm Blackstone Group announced a takeover offer for Celanese, after two years of wooing management. Shareholders formally approved the offer from Blackstone on 16 June 2004, and Blackstone completed the acquisition of Celanese AG. The company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and Blackstone changed the entity's name back to "Celanese Corporation". Under Blackstone, a number of streamlining initiatives were undertaken, and several acquisitions were made.
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On January 21, 2005, Celanese Corporation conducted an initial public offering and became a publicly-traded corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CE". When Blackstone sold the last of its shares in 2007, it had made five times what it had invested: Blackstone and its co-investors collected a $2.9 billion profit. In June 2009, the company sold its polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) business to Sekisui Chemical Co., Ltd. As of 2012 Celanese had a process to make ethanol from natural gas. During 2018 Celanese, along with 90 additional Fortune 500 companies, "paid an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less" as a result of Donald Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
In late 2020, Celanese sold their 45% stake in Polyplastics to Daicel, who already owned 55% of the company. This transaction resulted in Daicel attaining full ownership of Polyplastics.
Class-action lawsuits
In 1985, Hoechst Celanese was named (along with Shell Oil and US Brass) as a defendant in a class action lawsuit for $7 billion in both past and potential future damages for which they were accused of being liable because of leaks in their polybutylene (PB) plumbing-systems. The lawsuit alleged a complex scheme to mislead buyers into believing that PB plumbing systems were suitable for use as distribution systems for potable water and purportedly enjoying a lifetime of 50 years' service. According to the lawsuit, scientists from the defendants allegedly reported that the PB plumbing systems would degrade even when exposed to low concentrations of chlorine typically found in municipal water-systems. The lawsuit claimed that in spite of this knowledge, the defendants concealed the information and continued to market these products (Shell supplying PB resins to water-pipe manufacturers and Hoechst Celanese providing acetal resins to manufacturers of pipe-fittings) until approximately 1996. The lawsuit was settled in 1995 for US$950,000,000.
In January 2014, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the citizens of Cannon's Campground, seeking relief from health and environmental dangers posed by groundwater and surface-water contamination emanating from the Hoechst-Celanese manufacturing-plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The lawsuit alleged the dumping of a number of toxic chemicals into local waters, thus diminishing property-values and causing a number of illnesses. Hoechst Celanese asked the courts to dismiss these charges as spurious, claiming that its discharges have not caused substantial harm to anyone or to the environment, and further asserting that a 3-year limit on tort claims had expired, relieving the company of any responsibility for damages which might be eventually discovered.
From Wikipedia’s article on Celanese, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7