Momentive’s $5.6 Million Expansion to Add 10 Jobs

A growth spurt in the LED lighting industry means more work and more jobs for a Strongsville manufacturer of advanced materials.

Momentive Performance Materials will spend $5.6 million to expand its plant, 22557 West Lunn Rd., install new equipment, and add six production workers and four research scientists. The company currently employs 190 in Strongsville.

The Ohio Department of Development this week awarded Columbus-based Momentive a 60 percent, six-year Job Creation Tax Credit in exchange for the expansion. Momentive pledged to maintain its Strongsville operation for at least nine years.

Strongsville is the headquarters for Momentive’s quartz and ceramics division, which includes three other Ohio plants — in Highland Heights, Willoughby and Newark — as well as plants in China, Japan and Germany.

 The Strongsville plant will use the tax credit to ramp up production of boron nitride powder. The chemical compound has many uses, including enhancing the ability of plastics to conduct heat. Momentive sells boron nitride to plastics companies that supply manufacturers of lighting devices using LEDs, or light-emitting diodes.

 With demand for energy-efficient LEDs rising, Momentive expects to increase its capacity for making boron nitride by 50 percent, spokesman John Scharf said.

 “It’s very exciting right now to be in LEDs, and so we want to take advantage of that growth and be a part of that exciting opportunity,” he said.

 The LED lighting market is poised for explosive growth, according to a report last year by Pike Research. The market research firm in Boulder, Colo., projected that within 10 years, LEDs would eclipse compact fluorescents as the best option for energy-efficient lighting.

Last year, the Strongsville plant received a $918,000 grant from Ohio’s Third Frontier Commission to develop and market its boron nitride technology, which Momentive said would contribute to better plastic housings for LEDs. The Third Frontier is a $2.1 billion economic-development program to help high-tech industries grow.

There is some overlap between the project that the Third Frontier is funding and the expansion that the tax credit will support, Scharf said.

The expansion includes adding warehouse space to Momentive’s 265,000-square-foot plant, which also turns out products for the semiconductor, aerospace, personal care, thermal management, packaging and machine tool industries. Most of the new equipment to be purchased will be installed in the warehouse, Scharf said. 

The plant, built about 10 years ago, operated as Advanced Ceramics before that company’s sale to General Electric. GE sold that part of its business in 2006, and it became known as Momentive.

 “Momentive Perfomance Materials is a critical member of the Strongsville business community and we fully support their expansion plans,” Mayor Thomas Perciak wrote in a letter to state officials last month.

 The 10 new jobs will add $700,000 to the Strongsville operation’s annual payroll, according to the state Development Department. The new hires will make an average of nearly $50 an hour, including benefits.