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Wellman Assists Customers Affected by Force Majeure

Wellman Engineering Resins

PRESS RELEASE — AUGUST 2009

We have learned of the production problem that BASF has experienced, limiting their ability to ship certain products, including PA66. (details found below). While this problem occurred in their UK plant, we realized that it could affect their ability to serve customers in North America. If you have been affected by this, we would be happy to see if we can help, as we have plenty of capacity. This is just another way we are looking to support our customers with cost effective, consistent high quality resins that in our case are also environmentally beneficial.

BASF SE, 67056 Ludwigshafen, Germany
August 7th, 2009

Re: Declaration of Force Majeure with respect to the supply of Hexamethylenediamine (“HMD”), AH Salt (“Salt”) and PA66 polymer (“PA66”)

Dear valued customer, We regret to inform you that a recent event affecting our manufacturing facility at Seal Sands, UK has constrained our production capability for HMD and disrupted our production and supply chain of HMD, Salt and PA66 following events outside our reasonable control.

We are experiencing a leakage in our HMD dehydrogenation column which caused us to stop the HMD production. As a result of this event and the consecutive constraints and disruption of our pro- duction and supply chain we are declaring force majeure for HMD, Salt and PA66 supplied globally effective immediately and are implementing a sales allocation to account for the loss of ability to maintain full delivery rates of HMD, Salt and PA66.

At this point, we cannot predict the duration of the force majeure event or the effect, but it is our hope that normal product delivery rates will be restored as soon as possible and that the curtail- ments will be minimal. However, this force majeure event will result in a reduction in the quantities of HMD, Salt and or PA66 that BASF will be able to ship to you during this period. We will contact you soon to discuss the allocation details and our efforts to minimize the consequences of this event to your company.

We will also strive to keep you informed with respect to the developments, how much allocation will be required, and updates with respect to this force majeure event.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we manage through the production disruption caused by the above described leakage in our HMD plant. We hope to restore normal production as soon as possible.

Our sales representative will contact you soon to discuss further details.

Sincerely,
Wolfgang Micklitz
BASF SE
Director Global Business Management
Polyamide & Intermediates