Organic Pigments Roundtable

By Cynthia Challener

While paints and coatings serve many purposes-not the least of which is surface protection, enhancing the appearance of the substrates they are applied to is of significant importance to most users. Organic pigments enable formulators to offer an increasingly broad spectrum of colors for numerous applications.

Growth for organic pigments typically tracks with growth of the paint and coatings market, although some shifting in demand is occurring as consumer interest in bolder colors grows. Like with many other sectors of the chemical industry, organic pigment manufacturers strive to maintain margins in the face of rising energy and raw material costs and increasing offshore competition.

Organic pigments offer brilliant colors and high saturation. Because they are highly complex organic molecules, they fall within the category of very fine chemicals and require multi-step processes for their synthesis.

As a result, organic pigments tend to be much more expensive than their inorganic counterparts. Prices for organic pigments range from approximately $7/lb to $26/lb depending upon the color of the pigment, according to Steven Nerlfi of Kusumgar, Nerlfi & Growney, a market research firm focused on the paint and coatings industry.

In 2004, the global market for colored organic pigments was valued at approximately $2.44 billion, which corresponds to 26% of the overall pigments market for paint and coatings, according to Michael D. Brown, vice president of The ChemQuest Group, Inc., a management consulting firm located in Cincinnati, OH.

This segment of the pigments market is growing at about 3% per year. Colored inorganics in comparison account for only 9% of the total pigments market. Other categories of pigments include white and specialty effect pigments, which account for 52% and 13% of the market value, respectively.