Peter Huntsman

Taylor

B U S I N E S S

HUNTSMAN REJECTS TAKEOVER OFFERS Company says the proposals do not reflect its true value

H UNTSMAN CORP. HAS ENDED talks with all parties that have offered to purchase

the chemical company, say­ing that "none of the proposals were in the best interests of the shareholders. "

On Jan. 31, the day that pub­lished reports indicated Hunts­man was entertaining offers from private equity firm Apollo Man­agement, Huntsman's stock price jumped 11% to $21.62. Later that day, the company acknowledged it was discussing proposals that were presented late last year by unnamed suitors.

Huntsman had an initial public offering about ayear ago at $23 per

share. The firm's stock got off to a fast start, hitting a high of $30 in less than a month. However, its shares floundered and slipped to a low of $16.50 in September af­ter Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast.

Jon M. Huntsman, the compa­ny's founder and chairman, says the recent offers are unsatisfac­tory. "While the last proposals were above the price of our IPO last year, I believe they were not adequate, particularly in light of the risks, uncertainties, and ex­tended timing of the proposed transactions," he says.

CEO Peter R. Huntsman says the hurricanes will cost the compa­

ny about $140 million before taxes in the fourth quarter of 2005 but adds that they won't have much impact in 2006. "We are enthusi­astic about the global opportuni­ties and prospects we see for 2006 and beyond, including expanding our differentiated business and possible divestitures to accelerate our debt reduction," he says.

Huntsman's shares were pum-meled immediately after it rejected the takeover offer over the week­end. After closing on Friday, Feb. 3, at $22.95 per share, they opened on Monday, Feb. 6, at $20.84 per share.

Sergey Vasnetsov, a chemical stock analyst with Lehman Bros., says Huntsman shares were trad­ing at a fair price before the com­pany acknowledged the offers. He explains that a private equity buyer may be able to extract value from Huntsman by refinancing its debt and breaking it into spe­cialty and commodities units, but a buyer wouldn't be able to boost the value much above the $23 IPO price.-ALEXTULLO

A N A L Y T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y

PEPTIDE ADVANCE Supercritical fluid chromatography separates 40-amino-acid polypeptides

S UPERCRITICAL FLUID CHRO-matography (SFC)—long thought to be applicable on­

ly to nonpolar and weakly polar compounds—can now be used to separate polypeptides as long as 40 amino acids, according to a team of researchers at Virginia Polytech­nic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, and Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, in Mason, Ohio (Ana/. Chem. 2006,78,1535) .

SFC has a number of advan­tages that make it attractive for pharmaceut ical analysis , says coauthor J. David Pinkston, an analytical chemist at P&G. It is often faster and easier than stan­dard liquid chromatography, and

it requires less organic solvent. The mobile phase is mostly carbon di­oxide, which is less expensive and more easily recycled than organic solvents.

Virginia Tech chemistry profes­sor Larry Τ Taylor and grad stu­dent Jun (Sally) Zheng teamed up with Pinkston and P&G's Paul H. Zoutendam to extend SFC to such polar compounds as polypeptides. "Our goal was to see if we could devise a way to elute hydrophilic peptides , larger peptides, w i th a mobile phase that is compat­ible wi th mass spec detection," Pinkston says.

The only column that worked was an unusual stationary phase, 2-

ethylpyridine, developed for SFC by Princeton Chromatography. For the mobile phase, they used a mixture of C 0 2 and methanol, with just a touch of trifluoroace-tic acid. The separation method is compatible with mass spectro-metric detection.

<<The secret of our success is the use of trifboroacetic acid as the ad­ditive," Taylor says. He speculates that the acid protonates the poly­peptide and maybe the stationary phase, too, thereby causing the stationary phase to be less active so that the peptides don't irreversibly adsorb to the column.

M i l t o n L. Lee , a chemistry professor who works with SFC at Brigham Young University, Pro-vo, Utah, says, "SFC has shown recent growth in the analysis of pharmaceuticals, especially for chiral compounds, and the devel­opments in this paper should help to spur growth in other areas."— CELIA ARNAUD

1 4 C&EN / FEBRUARY 13, 2006 W W W . C E N - 0 N L I N E . O R G

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