Huntsman history

Returning to Salt Lake City in 1973, Huntsman began a policy of personally visiting all his clients, using a small airplane.

Finally, in 1976, Huntsman sold his container business to Keyes Fiber.

Huntsman was established in 1982 when Jon Meade Huntsman, a devout Mormon businessman with a declining fortune from a previous business, engineered a series of leveraged takeovers of other companies' polystyrene operations.

The company successfully managed to expand internationally; its first overseas facility was a small polystyrene plant at Stanslow, England that it acquired from Shell in May of 1984.

In 1986 the German chemical company Hoechst A.G. announced its intention to shut its three polystyrene plants at Chesapeake, Virginia, and Peru, Illinois.

In 1989 Huntsman purchased the European packaging business Skelmersdale that had once been a part of the old Huntsman Container concern.

In 1991 the company established a joint venture with General Electric Company to manufacture styrene acrylonitrile at Bay St Louis, Missouri.

Continuing his company's effort to diversify, Huntsman engineered the acquisition of the food and industrial film business of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in 1992.

In April 1994, Huntsman acquired the Texaco Chemical company for $1.1 billion.

Texaco Inc. agreed to sell its last remaining petrochemicals plant to Huntsman in 1999 for about $600 million.

It went public as the Huntsman Corporation on the New York Stock Exchange NYSE: HUN in February 2005.

However, on July 12, 2007, the agreement was terminated as Huntsman agreed to be bought by Apollo Management for $6.51 billion or $28 a share.

In December 2008, Apollo and Hexion agreed to pay Huntsman $1.1 billion in return for Huntsman dropping all charges against them.

In July 2012, the Company acquired the remaining interest in Russian joint venture, Huntsman NMG (HNMG).”

Huntsman also acquired the Performance Additives and Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) businesses of Rockwood Holdings, Inc. on October 1, 2014, to become the largest color and white pigments company in the world.

In May 2017, Huntsman and Clariant announced that they would merge, as equals, forming HuntsmanClariant which would be the global leader in speciality chemical production - with the deal valued at $20 billion.

The photograph at the top of this page shows the company’s multi-purpose facility in Vietnam, which was opened in 2018.

Revenue for 2019 was reported as approximately $7 billion (£5.4 billion), and today the corporation operates more than 70 manufacturing, research and development, and operations facilities in some 30 countries and employs around 9,000 members of staff.