Barry Took the Plant Next Door
Cabot shut its Barry fumed silica plant in the same quarter its fumed silica volumes rose, because the feedstock came by pipeline from the Dow unit that closed. Plus Trinseo's storm, Koppers' $215.8m, an $850m DMSO deal, and a Rhine that finally turned.
Cabot's fumed metal oxide volumes went up last quarter, on electronics demand.
In that same quarter it stopped making fumed silica at Barry, Wales.
Both facts sit four pages apart in a Form 10-Q that landed Thursday, and the thing that reconciles them is a pipeline.
The fence line at Barry
Cabot built the Barry fumed silica plant in 1991, against the fence of Dow Corning's silicone monomer plant, and Dow Corning fed it the silanes. That is the whole design: a chlorosilane by-product crosses a property line and comes back as high-purity silica.
Cabot expanded the site by 25% in March 2013 on the strength of that relationship.
Dow announced on July 7, 2025 that it would permanently shut the Barry base siloxanes unit, alongside the Böhlen cracker and the Schkopau chlor-alkali chain. Cabot opened its fumed metal oxides restructuring plan in the quarter that followed, and the 10-Q filed Thursday closes it out: the company "ceased production of fumed silica at its manufacturing plant in Barry, Wales in the third quarter of fiscal 2026."
So the answer to the question this desk asked on July 10, when it wanted to know who absorbs Barry, turns out to include a second plant. Nobody absorbed it. It took its neighbour.
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