Lanxess China Sales Improving

Despite improving sales in recent months, the 2009 outlook for Lanxess in the Greater China region is said to remain “murky”. At the sidelines of a company event on June 11, Martin Kraemer, chief executive of the company’s Greater China operations told Reuters “we have seen a pick-up in demand and also in sales in China over the last couple of months…What we currently see is nice, but will that be sustainable till the end of the year? We don’t know.”

Sales growth in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China slowed to 15 per cent in 2008, compared with 23.4 per cent a year earlier, commented Kraemer. Sales in China last year amounted to some 500 million euros, accounting for 44 per cent of Lanxess’s Asia Pacific sales but less than 10 per cent of global revenue. Kraemer declined to divulge forecast China sales for 2009.