Lubrizol announced a partnership with Polyhose to set up a medical tubing plant in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu. The new site will enable Lubrizol to quintuple its local medical tubing volume. The tubing will be targeted at neurovascular and cardiovascular medical uses, including balloon catheters and catheters for minimally invasive procedures.

The companies expect to break ground on the Chennai facility in 2025 and have the first operations go live in 2026. New project is now extending Lubrizol's already committed $350 million into a support of local manufacturing in India. Earlier this year, Lubrizol opened a Global Capability Center in Pune and made an announcement on buying a 120-acre plot of land in Aurangabad to build Lubrizol's largest manufacturing facility in India and the company's second-largest in the world in support of South Asia's expanding transportation and industrial markets.

“This agreement brings precision manufacturing technology into India – a new business opportunity for the country to serve critical care markets in India and across the globe”, Bhavana Bindra, Lubrizol’s managing director in India, the Middle East and Africa, said in a news release. “Lubrizol is proud to enable high-quality solutions and local access with in-region partners, ensuring the region expands into new categories while reducing reliance on imports to service medical device needs”.

Shabbir Y J, managing director of Polyhose India, says the new memorandum of understanding with Lubrizol takes the companies’ seven-year-old collaboration to the next level. “This MoU marks a new chapter in our shared journey, and we are proud that in Tamil Nadu, we have experienced substantial growth in recent years”.

The new plant will produce tubing with Lubrizol’s advanced medical-grade thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) and other thermoplastic polymers. The manufacturing facility will be ISO 13485 compliant.

“We are honored to collaborate with Polyhose and the Government of Tamil Nadu for this exciting project”, said Rebecca Liebert, president and CEO of Lubrizol. “India serves as a hub for Lubrizol’s innovation and growth, and our ongoing investment highlights our dedication to a local-for-local and local-for-global strategy in India. With this latest investment, we are positioned to deliver world-class medical tubing and play a significant role in the growth of the Indian medical industry”.