Five Minutes with…

Harry S. Rathore, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, Callery

Chemistry Today: Good morning Dr. Rathore.  Can you briefly present Callery and tell us a bit about what parts of the fine chemicals market drive your activity?

Rathore: Callery Corporation was created as a new stand-alone entity in March 2017.  It was born from BASF’s divestiture of its Inorganic Specialties business.  Now, Callery is backed by a private equity firm, Edgewater Capital Partners.

Callery is a developer and manufacturer of highly reactive reagents (” process-aids”). We offer several specialty alcoholates derived from sodium and potassium metals.  Callery is back-integrated with the production of potassium metal on an industrial scale.

We are also experts in Borane Chemistry, and produce on an industrial scale several borane reagents in multi-tons quantities, which are used for chemical transformations in the production of active-ingredients in pharma and agro API production.

Our markets expand from Life-Sciences to Electronic Materials:  Innovators and generic producers of pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and aroma active-ingredients uses our products and services.  For those markets, we offer reagents which facilitate crucial reactions such as chiral reductions of ketones, Suzuki couplings, reductive aminations etc.  Another interesting part of our business is in Liquid crystals (LCDs) and semiconductor applications:  materials such as Na and K tert-butoxides, that go into making the LCD for smartphones and televisions etc.

CT: Which of these markets is more active?

Rathore: There is an excellent growth potential for our business.  Currently the bestselling market for us is in life sciences, (pharma and agro business).  Other growing market is the use of borane reagents in fuel cell applications, and rubber polymerization.

CT: What is your take on flow chemistry?

Rathore: Flow-chemistry has a great future. New improvements in doing chemistries in flow reactors rather than batch-process is the way to go for many reactive chemistries requiring shorter reaction time. We at Callery are evaluating use of flow-chemistry in the production of specialty alcoholates. 

What does Callery offer that no one else can do?

Rathore: Excellent technical support and customer service. Consistent quality and reliability of supply.  Callery has large, temperature-controlled warehousing capabilities in Europe, North America and Asia.  All our products are produced with high quality systems and procedures adhering to EHS, ISO and EPA standards.  And last, we always look to find technological innovations and put them to work into new applications.