LANXESS AG Contact: Udo Erbstößer Market Communications Trade and Technical Press 51369 Leverkusen Germany Phone: +49 214 30-54529 Fax: +49 214 30-44865 udo.erbstoesser@lanxess.com

Speech at the Preliminary Press Conference LANXESS at K 2013,

July 1, 2013, Düsseldorf, Germany

________________________

From the presentation by

Dr. Michael Zobel

Head of the High Performance Materials business unit

of LANXESS AG

“High Performance Materials – Global heavyweight in lightweight construction”

(Please check against delivery)

(2013-00008e)

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Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to welcome you here in Düsseldorf. K 2013 is the worldwide plastics industry’s premiere event, and the High Performance Materials business unit wants to take advantage of it to showcase its leading global position in lightweight automotive construction based on high-tech polyamides and polyesters. I will describe to you why we have a special position in lightweight construction worldwide as a supplier of high-performance thermoplastics and as a development partner to the international automotive industry. You will learn how we plan to expand and globalize our business through this unique position. And I will show you, based on several innovative materials and applications, that partnership with us makes motor vehicles significantly lighter. Our products and our know-how lead the way to sustainable, green mobility that conserves resources and protects the climate.

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My name is Michael Zobel. I am for nearly three years now head of High Performance Materials, or HPM for short. Our business unit is part of the Performance Polymers segment at LANXESS. Nearly half of sales of HPM, totaling over EUR 500 million, were generated last year in the automotive and electrical/electronics industries. With a capacity of 260,000 metric tons per year of polyamide and polybutylene terephthalate compounds, we are one of the top five suppliers of these thermoplastics on the global market.

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HPM’s success and our excellent reputation on the international market are based on three strong brands: Durethan®, Pocan® and HiAnt®. Durethan® and Pocan® are our polyamide and PBT compounds that are tailored to the individual needs of customers and industries. They are materials for technically complex and innovative component solutions that would otherwise be often impossible. I will go into that in greater detail in my presentation and give you a few examples. One of HPM’s strengths, which sets us apart from most of our competitors, is our solid expertise in material, application, process and technology development. We have pooled this expertise under the HiAnt® brand. With HiAnt®, we help customers on all levels of component engineering: from the concept phase, material optimization and the computation of component properties using state-of-the-art simulation tools, to processing, component testing and production launch. Many customers want to partner with us specifically to benefit from HiAnt®, because they want to be sure that a new, complex application development will succeed.

Another unique feature of HPM is the high degree of backward integration in the value-added chain for our high-tech plastics. We manufacture the glass fibers for our polyamide and PBT compounds,

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the polyamide 6 monomer caprolactam and its raw materials all in our own world-scale plants. This enables us to control the availability of these strategically important precursors and the cost of their manufacture. As a result, our customers benefit from optimal supply and delivery reliability, something our partners in the automotive industry appreciate greatly.

Ladies and gentlemen, HPM’s primary objective is to grow faster than the market primarily through high-value projects. We are banking on markets, such as China and South America, and have systematically globalized our business over the last few years. Three years ago at K trade fair, we announced our investment in a compounding facility in Jhagadia, India, and since then we have even added production plants in Porto Feliz, Brazil, and Gastonia, U.S.A. They each offer compounding capacities of 20,000 metric tons per year. The plant in Brazil will be commencing operations in fourth quarter of this year. Furthermore, we have long been operating a compounding facility in Wuxi, China, which we have continuously expanded in recent years. Not to forget, of course, our compounding plants in Krefeld-Uerdingen and Hamm-Uentrop. Overall, we are present with our products on every populated continent and close to our international customers, such as automotive manufacturers and their system- and sub-suppliers.

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Naturally, we must make not only our products, but also our know-how and services available globally, so that we can effectively support our customers locally with their projects in line with the principles of HiAnt®. For this reason, we have expanded and more tightly integrated our worldwide network of regional and local centers for product and applications development in recent years. The latest example is the new Asia Pacific Development Center in Hong Kong. It has been helping project partners with component engineering and the market introduction of new applications since April of this year. The Center is to become our technology hub for customers in the Asia/Pacific region.

The backbone of our global network of compounding facilities is Antwerp. This plant supplies all the compounding facilities with basic polyamide resin and glass fibers. We will soon be further optimizing our value-added chain in Antwerp for our strategically important precursors. The world’s largest plant for the production of polyamide 6 is scheduled to go into operation there in the 3rd quarter of 2014 with an annual capacity of 90,000 metric tons. It is in the immediate vicinity of our caprolactam plant. Through its size alone, this plant network gives us reliable and cost-efficient access to our raw materials now and in the future. Above all, it contributes to the global expansion of our business in the growth markets. We expect in about two years to be using over 80 percent of the precursors we

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produce at our Belgian site for our own needs to make our high-tech plastics.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a reason why our investment activity focuses on the BRICS countries, such as China and India. In these countries, the production and sale of motor vehicles are on the rise, resulting in demand for plastics. And we want to profit from it. At the same time, international automotive manufacturers must reduce the weight of their vehicles in order to minimize fuel consumption and thereby cut CO2 emissions. Consequently, solutions in lightweight construction, using lightweight plastics, are in greater demand than ever before. And what is better able to handle this task than our lightweight, high-tech plastics? Our HPM business unit has established benchmarks in lightweight construction in the past, for example with polyamide plastic/metal composite technology. It reduced the weight of automotive front ends by up to 50 percent compared to metal-only components. Known as hybrid technology, this solution helped significantly in making HPM a top address in lightweight construction for the automotive industry.

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Our competence in lightweight construction is one of our talents that we intend to make the most of. For example, we recently acquired Bond-Laminates GmbH, an outstanding and established manufacturer and supplier of continuous fiber-reinforced performance composites based on thermoplastics, and its Tepex® brand. Tepex® has the decisive advantage that, as one of the few high-tech materials of its kind, it has become standard in the volume production of various components. While many thermoset fiber composite materials usually are only suitable for moderate production volumes of 10,000 to 40,000 units per year, Tepex® makes it possible to economically manufacture more than a million components in large scale operations. That is a real quantum leap! For example, a well-known smartphone manufacturer RIM from Canada currently produces over a million battery housings a month using a special glass fiber-reinforced Tepex® grade for one of its latest Blackberry models. The acquisition of Bond-Laminates thus puts us in a unique position: We are now one of the few thermoplastics manufacturers in the world that can supply production-ready compounds and performance composites with the associated applications know-how for the volume production of lightweight components. Tepex® also opens us interesting opportunities in another respect. In many cases, it gives us a high-performance and economical alternative to carbon fiber-reinforced thermoset lightweight materials. Used in place of sheet

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metal, it will also significantly enhance the potential of hybrid technology for lightweight construction. Initial production applications have already verified this development. It goes without saying that we want to score points in the growth markets, in particular, with Tepex® and the composites derived from it.

We had a long history of successful partnership with Bond-Laminates prior to the acquisition. And this brings me to the examples I mentioned before, which demonstrate our leading position in lightweight construction. Together with ZF Friedrichshafen AG and other partners, we have developed the world’s first continuous glass fiber-reinforced passenger car brake pedal made of polyamide and designed for high-volume production. It is produced from a Tepex® grade and a Durethan® polyamide 6 using hybrid technology, and it is about 50 percent lighter than comparable, conventional brake pedals made of steel, but still just as strong mechanically. And the reward for this engineering work is that the first brake pedal incorporating this technology will be installed in premium production vehicles at the end of this year. This is all the more of a success when you consider that all-plastic brake pedals, as safety components, were viewed as an impossibility just a few years ago on account of the extremely high demands imposed on their mechanical strength.

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Here is another example of our expertise in lightweight construction: the front end carrier of the new Skoda Octavia. It is made from a highly reinforced Durethan® grade with 60 percent glass fibers, and only from this polyamide 6. I emphasize that fact because competitors have already boasted of all-plastic front end carriers, which, however, require sheet metal reinforcements in areas subject to extreme load. That is not the case with the Octavia’s front end, which is fabricated by Faurecia. The top support of this component, located between the fenders, is comprised entirely of our high-performance polyamide – even though this area is exposed to high mechanical forces in the area of the hood lock and has to be very thin due to the lack of space. Our polyamide really displays its strengths in this application, namely its unusually high rigidity and strength. The reduction in weight is also remarkable: The front end carrier is 25 percent lighter than a virtually designed carrier made of standard polyamide 6 with 30 percent glass fiber content.

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Ladies and gentlemen, you should not think, however, that lightweight construction is all we can do. HPM makes innovative contributions to green mobility in other areas, too. The keyword here is the engine compartment: Temperatures there are rising significantly, in part because of new, fuel-saving engine concepts, such as forced induction engines. Our polyamides, which have become common under the hood as materials for air- and media-conducting hollow components, such as intercooler and coolant lines, must be able to withstand these temperatures. For this reason we developed XTS1 and XTS2, two new high-tech systems for heat stabilizing Durethan®. They increase the continuous service temperatures of this high-performance polyamide by 60 °C and more. That is a big leap in heat resistance – one that was unthinkable just a few years ago. The polyamides in the XTS2 range can even withstand continuous service temperatures of up to 230 °C. To our knowledge, most commercially available heat stabilizers today can no longer keep up with that.

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Finally, I would like to briefly introduce an entirely different material innovation. The focus this time is on lighting technology. That shows that we support other global trends beyond mobility with our innovative products. Growing urbanization and rising affluence are driving up demand for artificial light sources. But in view of climate change, they must become more energy efficient. Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs for short, are therefore becoming increasingly widespread. In response, we have developed a new Pocan® polyester grade for LED components. Its reflection of light hardly decreases at all under the influence of heat and light, and remains unusually high at values of over 90 percent. If it is used in the production of an LED housing, for example, LED light losses are very low. The material is a cost-efficient alternative to expensive, high-melting specialty polyamides. These additionally have the disadvantage of yellowing over time, which impairs light reflection and thus the brightness of the LEDs.

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Ladies and gentlemen, all of these innovation examples should make one thing above all clear: We are ideally equipped to further strengthen our outstanding position in all the key global markets with innovative product solutions, and to globalize our business through the construction of new production facilities. Our focus along the way is on the growth markets. There, in particular, we seek to benefit from our unique position as a premium supplier of lightweight construction solutions for the automobile, a position we have reinforced by acquiring Bond-Laminates. I am sure that you will be hearing more about this unique position in the future. Learn more about our competence in lightweight construction by visiting us at K! We look forward to your visit. Thank you for your attention.

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Forward-Looking Statements. This news release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by LANXESS AG management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments.