WACKER is a globally active company with state-of-the-art specialty chemical products. Our portfolio includes over 3,500 products supplied to more than 3,500 customers in over 100 countries. WACKER products are found in countless everyday items, ranging from cosmetic powders to solar cells.
Silicon Is Our Main Starting Material
Most of our products are based on inorganic starting materials. Silicon-based products account for 80 percent of WACKER sales, and products that are primarily ethylene-related for 20 percent. Our customers come from virtually every major sector, ranging from consumer goods, food, pharmaceuticals, textiles and the solar, electrical/electronic and basic-chemical industries, to medical technology, biotech and mechanical engineering. As a manufacturer of silicones and polymers, WACKER is particularly well represented in the automotive and construction sectors. We are also a key supplier of silicon wafers to the semiconductor industry. In recent years, we have greatly expanded our polycrystalline-silicon business for the solar industry, where WACKER is one of the world’s largest manufacturers.
Focus on Growth Markets
WACKER operates around the world and is continuing to expand, particularly in growth regions. We expanded our local sales office in Chennai (India) in 2011, from where our joint venture Wacker Metroark Chemicals Pvt. Ltd. serves our customers in southern India. WACKER maintains 52 sales offices in 29 countries. Our sales organization is supplemented by a network of technical competence centers, where customers learn about WACKER’s product portfolio, and the WACKER ACADEMY, where we offer technical training sessions on our products and their application fields.
1 Only majority-owned subsidiaries
Nünchritz: WACKER’s Second Multidivisional Site
WACKER’s global production network consists of 25 production sites – eight are in Europe, seven in the Americas and ten in Asia. The Group’s key production site is Burghausen (Germany), with about 9,700 employees. In 2011, Burghausen’s manufacturing output reached around 500,000 metric tons. That is about 50 percent of groupwide production volumes. We are expanding our Nünchritz site (Saxony), where our first polysilicon facility outside Burghausen started up in 2011, with a nominal production capacity of 15,000 metric tons per year. Alongside Burghausen, Nünchritz is thus WACKER’s second multidivisional site.
