Nordic Investment Bank signs EUR 50 million loan with Kemira Oyj for new biomaterials production facility in Finland

Mechanism

NIB, the multilateral development bank owned by the eight Nordic and Baltic member countries and headquartered in Helsinki, signed a 10-year EUR 50 million loan with Kemira Oyj, a Finnish specialty-chemicals group, on 17 October 2025 (NIB's public announcement followed on 20 October 2025). The loan co-finances construction of a new commercial-scale production facility for bio-based alpha-glucans — renewable, biodegradable polysaccharide materials produced using an engineered plant-sugar fermentation platform that Kemira has jointly developed with International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) since 2020. Total project cost is approximately EUR 130 million; the NIB facility covers roughly 38% of that. The plant supports Kemira's strategic shift toward renewable and biodegradable chemical inputs, part of a target to generate EUR 500 million in revenue from renewable-sourced materials by 2030.

Global Trade Alert logs the transaction as a "red" (certainly harmful) state-loan intervention on the standard grounds that below-market multilateral development-bank financing to a named private manufacturer is a potential trade- and competition-distorting subsidy, naming Belgium, China and France as affected trading partners given exposure in starches and starch products, plastics in primary forms, and chemical products n.e.c. — GTA's sector-classification proxies for the alpha-glucan biomaterials value chain rather than direct counterparties disclosed by NIB or Kemira.

This is the second NIB-Kemira loan on the register: NIB signed an earlier EUR 50 million facility with Kemira in February 2024 for R&D investment at its Espoo site (GTA state-act 86121) — a separate transaction with the same lender, borrower and loan amount but a different project (R&D vs. this commercial-scale production facility). It follows the same template as other Nordic/Baltic development-bank financings to named private manufacturers logged on this register (Koskisen, Hafslund, Baltic Storage Platform), where NIB funds a private producer's capacity or decarbonisation investment and GTA logs the below-market financing as a state-aid-adjacent intervention. Severity is set at 2, in line with other NIB facilities in the EUR 30-90 million range (Hafslund EUR 86m, Baltic Storage Platform EUR 27.7m), reflecting a mid-sized loan financing new industrial production capacity rather than R&D or working capital.

Downstream implications

• Adds to a recurring pattern of NIB financing for Finnish specialty-chemical and

bio-based-materials manufacturing capacity, alongside the February 2024 Kemira R&D loan.

• Belgium, China and France are named as trade-affected parties by GTA, tied to

starch-derivative, plastics-in-primary-forms and chemical-product trade exposure rather than a disclosed direct counterparty relationship.

• Supports Kemira/IFF's bio-based alpha-glucan platform reaching commercial scale,

relevant to tracking EU industrial-biotechnology capacity build-out as a petrochemical-substitution trend.

Open questions

• Whether NIB's below-market lending to Kemira confers a material competitive

advantage over non-NIB-member-country producers of comparable bio-based polysaccharide materials, or is immaterial at this loan size.

• Commissioning timeline and nameplate capacity for the new facility were not

disclosed in the primary source.