When Mark Newman walked into the lobby of a Tokyo hotel for a customer conference late last year, the chief executive of the US chemical giant Chemours had the rare experience of being mobbed.
“I felt like I was a rock star,” Newman recalls. “I was swarmed by people saying: we need more.”
The “more” in question is a class of chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), critical to the production of everything from smartphones and firefighters’ suits to aircraft and electric vehicles — but especially to microchips. Anyone trying to secure supply for this year was going to be disappointed. One key PFAS, Newman says, “was completely sold out”.
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