© Copyright 2007-2022
Farewell, my friends!
With this long and boring page (including some free-of-cost grammar errors) i wish to thank you for this +20 years long opportunity some of you gave to grow together: ADG Polymer Solutions VAT number is… closed!
There are several reason behind my decision that I want to share: first of all my company (LMS) is beating for the third year in a row its record in businness volume, 2024 luckily started like a cannonball. Anyway it is a small pighouse, a very small one, so my time is limited and now my own company is absorbing all myself leaving few for… yours!
Family is also growing and I’m becoming old: my exothermal curve passed its peak and i am no more that ping-pong ball that most of you knew bouncing in your reactors room.
There are some more reasons behind this: i always (proudly) followed my n.1 rule; so no technology sold eastern than… the west! Since our politicians (with a small contribution given by a lazy Swedish girl that went to New York sailing on 40 tons of polystyrene to.. save CO2) decided plastic is evil, number of customer to whom I can offer my services (in the west) is reducing year after year; this will not have an happy ending for us but, anyway, i’m still an European Citizen and a proudly patriot.
My second (well known and appreciated) businness rule tells: “what i see in your plant i will not disclose with next customer” (sounds strange by an Italian? Yes I know); this has a negative drawback for my pockets: some engaged me simply to know what competitors were developing and so… for the ones that know me… this didn’t bring me new coins!
Third rule leading last years with you was “or my way or the highway”: this reduced even further number of partners able to put their (sometimes) Jurassic method in question; there are few stuff for sure on planet earth, one of these is my complete inability to shut-up; if there is a lesson I learned in these years is that, often, to remove fails in a cast slab you need to change just one chemical: brain!
Unluckily some (not all!) of my old time prediction shared with you between a load of mma and a beer afterwork are becoming now sadly true: people that refused to innovate now are turning from cast company to reseller of something produced elsewere with no environmental care, human right care and, most of all, quality! This is the last sing of the swan, they probably know it and this makes me so sad for the wonderful people employed there.
I offered truly next generation polymers (ir-shielding, nano-charged photovoltaic collectors, low polymerization strategies that can save GigaWatt of energy to produce better cast, in a quicker time and really giving plastic a true green flag) to people that simply didn’t believe there is a market for specialities; often I heard from some of you that i should keep it “K.i.s.s.” (keep it stupid and simple): this was a mantra that was working in the 80s. Now I believe it will work no more here, maybe there but just for a while more.
Big player in this market (i bet Otto and friends are rolling in their own grave) now are headed by funds and financial minded investors; these people look at PMMA through an excel file row: entrepreneurship is completely another story, they close a plant that can produce diamonds out of methyl-methacrylate because energy cost grew 3,6% more than predicted: shame on you!
Small producers are often strangled by the unloyal competition of their own cheap drug-dealer: they buy their own venom from people that are not able to take care of their own enviroinment thinking this will ease their pain and give them 12-24 more months; this will not, your sweat may be but… maybe now it is late for you to understand.
Last reason for me to quit was that in recent years, instead than innovate, most of us decided to buy a big can of green paint and rebrand our companies with credible, working and appealing (but senseless) green slogans: a petrochemical compound becomes green-acrylic for the benefit of some brainless marketing director that owns a Tesla thinking they're saving the planet. Another way to make it stupid and simple: dear customer, if you buy this, you save turtles.
I’m honestly and truly really happy this green (bullshit) seems to work well for the ones that decided to adopt this winning commercial strategy: i admire your cleverness. In the end world is full of brainless that, for some reason, need acrylic panels so… why not to give them the idea that buying some oil-based plastic they do something for the planet?
Who still remain so? You my friends! You that were able to purchase with your money a bite of my ideas and, sometimes quickly, sometimes later (sometimes sadly never) put my seeds to fruit: sometimes we got blooms and sometimes just weed, all the time I truly had fun with you! THANK YOU!
Acrylic windows started its route to saving lives of pilots during WW2 (even if they were “the wrong ones” ahahahah!); PMMA is raw material of bone cement keeping people alive and standing, gives back possibility to see to blinds, it is one of the few truly biocompatible polymer and it is sooooooo beautiful: when you see first “ghosts” appearing in a beaker under stirring soon after initiator falls in, due to different refractive index of the PMMA/MMA mixture, when this devil start to boil and calm down again, and becomes so transparent and beautiful in the mold; one of the very few polymer that can be customized in batches of 1kg with colors, particles, effect, embedments, properties… I love it! Some of you (the most) share this love.
In my small pighouse we’re cooking some new specialities, some we try to sell them, some will remain transparent seeds: they are no more on sold but, if you offer friendship, you will have a bite for free.
I want to say thanks for the opportunity to all, but some of you made a breach in my heart so I will try to mention here you all. Thanks to Gilles, Damien, Jacques, Sasha, Martin, Frank, Franco, Didier, Gertrude, Massimo, Marco, Maria Savina, Samuele, Alessandro, Domenico, Valentine, Denis, Alenka, Jasmina, Fabian, Eyal, Igal, Bojan, Sergio, Oscar, Emanuele, Luc, Luca, Marcelo, Guido, Paolo, Paul, Paulina, Monja, Klaus, Hans. I am sure I forgot someone: so sorry.
This website will stay alive, my mobile is always the same and… if you want to reach me… just do it!
Ciao!
Antonio