In 2024, Wanhua's total R&D investment exceeded 4.5 billion yuan, with more than 4,700 R&D personnel. Focusing on the coatings sector, the company has established an integrated R&D platform and a full-industry-chain advantage, building 10 major coating R&D platforms. Wanhua Chemical adheres to innovation and environmental protection, making breakthroughs in core materials and launching over 400 coating raw material solutions, including isocyanates, special amines, resins, additives, acrylic acids, etc. The company now is offering more environmentally friendly products, competitive solutions, and efficient services to customers worldwide.

Raw Materials: Environmentally Friendly, Efficient, and High-Performance

There are several high-performance isocyanate curing agents that meet market demands for environmental protection and efficiency. The low-viscosity products — WANNATE® HT-300 plus, WANNATE® HT-3100 plus, and WANNATE® HB-200 — reduce VOC emissions while significantly improving application efficiency. The fast-drying type — WANNATE® IT-170B/S — features excellent chemical resistance and fast-drying properties, making it suitable for automotive, refinish, and industrial coatings. It helps customers shorten drying times and reduce energy consumption. The blocked type — WANNATE® HTBL/ITBL — offers outstanding weather and chemical resistance, making it ideal for coil coatings and metal baking paints. Especially, the ITBL product is FDA-certified for use in food-contact applications.

Packaging: Breakthrough in Water-Based Ink Resins

Wanhua Chemical launches innovative water-based ink resin products for various printing applications, including cardboard, paper, and film. The Wantipro® 0831 product provides high opacity, excellent color performance, fast drying, and long-term storage stability, ensuring efficient large-scale production and print quality. The company also offers diverse solutions for paper-based and film-based inks, as well as adhesion-promoting primers for films, featuring high color development and excellent adhesion.

Home and Building: Comprehensive Solutions for Various Scenarios

From inside to outdoors, the company has the ability to support different scenarios. The water-based 2K solution for general furniture offers superior appearance, high hardness, chemical resistance, wear resistance, and good application properties, enhancing the user experience for wooden furniture. For outdoor wood, the high-gloss, high-transparency Lacper® 4572 provides excellent water, weather, and anti-blocking resistance. In addition, we also introduce high-performance UV resins for PVC flooring, offering enhanced wear and stain resistance.

Biobased Materials: Ensuring Superior Performance and Supporting Carbon Reduction Goals

Wanhua Chemical desires to develop sustainable materials to reduce environmental impact and support the entire industry chain in reducing carbon emissions. The biobased PDI, derived from biomass lysine, has a biobased carbon content of over 71%, reducing CO₂ emissions by 20% compared to traditional isocyanates while maintaining excellent yellowing resistance and flexibility. The high-biobased content wood furniture coating emulsion Lacper® 4605 breaks through the previous 30-40% technical barrier for biobased content, meanwhile, balancing appearance, anti-stacking, and performance characteristics.

"0" SVOC Technology

Focusing on the safety and health of downstream coating applications, Wanhua Chemical has become one of the first coating suppliers in the industry to launch "zero" SVOC technology products. Wanhua Chemical's unique solvent-free technology is an innovative coating production technology. By adjusting the molecular weight and controlling the polymer cross-linking sequence, this technology significantly enhances the performance of the coating film. The core of this technology lies in achieving "zero" VOC (volatile organic compounds) and "zero" SVOC (semi-volatile organic compounds) emissions from the coating, thereby greatly reducing the potential harm of the coating to the environment and human health. Since it contains no harmful substances, this technology does not release harmful gases during application, posing no threat to the health of the applicators and occupants. Moreover, the use of this technology helps to reduce indoor air pollution and improve indoor environmental quality.

AI Practices: Transforming the Chemical Industry

AI has brought tremendous opportunities to the chemical industry, enabling enterprises to achieve significant improvements in production efficiency, cost control, safety protection, and R&D innovation. This, in turn, enhances their market competitiveness and sustainable development capabilities. Currently, Wanhua Chemical has developed and implemented dozens of AI application scenarios, including using AI to accelerate the R&D process; building smart factories to fully integrate the production and supply chain and achieve integrated and efficient coordination of production operations in the park; and constructing intelligent parks to ensure the safety, intelligence, and greenness of the park.

Computational chemistry and machine learning are utilized to assist in the molecular design of catalysts. By establishing structure-activity relationship models, the algorithm can recommend potential molecules based on given selectivity and other indicators of the catalysts, which are then synthesized and verified. This approach can identify feasible schemes from thousands of possibilities involving dozens of materials, significantly improving research and development efficiency.

Also, in 2024, we officially launched the Wanhua Materials Intelligent Assistant, a large-scale material model-based intelligent Q&A system. This system leverages AI technology to provide customers with more efficient and convenient services for product consultation and technical support. By conducting secondary pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment of open-source large-language models, it has been transformed into a "versatile and specialized" material-oriented large-scale model. Moreover, the model integrates the company's product knowledge base, enabling it to offer customers Q&A services for product consultation, grade recommendations, and technical support. This helps customers obtain company product information more conveniently and quickly, understand product features, application scenarios, and common problem-solving methods, and enhance customer experience and efficiency.

Dual Carbon Commitment: 2030-Carbon Neutrality; 2048-Peak Carbon

Relying on continuous technological innovation and operational optimization, Wanhua Chemical is committed to minimizing the impact of its business on climate, environment and is working with partners to continuously drive decarbonization across the value chain.

• Clean Energy

Wanhua Chemical's overall goal for zero-carbon electricity is to achieve a clean-power ratio of over 50% in all domestic production bases by 2030 and to realize full-scale clean-power coverage by 2035.

• Energy Efficiency

Taking Wanhua Chemical’s world-first industrial waste-heat low-carbon clean-heating project as an example, it was put into use during the 2023 heating season. Once fully constructed, the project will meet the clean-energy heating demand for nearly 67 million square meters. It also achieves a perfect combination of energy-saving technologies in chemical plants and low-grade heat-energy technologies for civilian use. 

• Innovation Technologies

Wanhua's main product, MDI, has been upgraded to its seventh generation, with a significant reduction in energy consumption. Wanhua Chemical adopts innovative HCl catalytic oxidation technology to convert the by-product HCl from the MDl facility into chlorine gas. This technology features world-pioneering non-precious metal catalyst and fluidized bed process, is able to directly convert HCl under mild conditions. The process has the advantages of high reaction efficiency, environmental friendliness, low fixed investment and operating costs. Recently, the hydrogen chloride recycling and oxidation project has been further improved in efficiency and capacity by technological upgrades including catalyst and facilities, contributing to our path to circular economy

Wanhua Chemical aims to convey the concept of sustainable development to global customers through its cutting-edge products, promoting the green transformation of the chemical industry and contributing to a better life.