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Although all BOC business enjoyed growth in the 1980s, the largest activity of the Group remained the production and supply of all major industrial and special gases.
Throughout the 1980s, BOC consolidated its position as the most international of the industrial gases companies, operating in some 50 countries. |
In 1982, BOC acquired a 43 per cent interest in the Japanese industrial gases company, OSK.
In the late 1980s BOC enjoyed significant increases in sales of nitrogen and special gases, especially to the food and electronics industries. BOC also extended its customer base due to the mushrooming of the convenience food industry; the launch of a leisure business supplying gases for dispensing beer, soft drinks and balloon gas; the burgeoning environmental control industry; and the manufacture of semiconductors. By 1986, sales of nitrogen were double those of oxygen, whereas 10 years earlier they had been about the same.
The end of the Cold War in 1989 led to a decline in military expenditure and consequently lower levels of industrial activity.
In the 1990s, concern over the effects of greenhouse gases led to an explosion of interest in the environment. Sales of Vitox and Primox oxygenation systems trebled and BOC started to supply non-CFC refrigerants. Meanwhile BOC’s food and drink packaging business expanded and matured, and the use of nitrogen and carbon dioxide for refrigerated transport increased.
The spectacular growth in the semiconductor industry was reflected in an equally spectacular growth in Edwards' vacuum business. The semiconductor industry led the trend in the emergence of global customers and, to serve the needs of these customers better, in 1997 BOC Edwards was formed, bringing together both vacuum and electronic gases.
By the end of the decade, BOC Edwards was offering exhaust gas management, chemical blending and delivery systems and chillers, as well as vacuum and gases. |