"With respect to higher raw material costs, that is going to be a problem for the entire industry.
"Lighthouse gives us the ability to do this for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough bill-of-materials cost that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices".
The rising price tag for the Tokyo Games has been blamed on higher labour and materials costs that have resulted from vast reconstruction projects in the area of north-east Japan that was destroyed by the 2011 disaster.
Rohm & Haas, like other chemical makers, has been hurt by a slowing economy, which has dampened demand from customers including automobile and construction companies, and by energy and raw materials costs that have soared in the last year.
Officials at the H. B. Fuller Company, the St. Paul-based adhesives maker that sells mainly to other businesses, however, see some relief where Mr. Patman does not: they are raising prices 5percentt or more on many of their products to offset raw materials costs that have grown mainly because of higher petroleum prices.
Although rising unemployment will continue to act as a drag on the market, car loans, the lifeblood of the industry, have become available again, even to less-than-prime borrowers.Mr Warburton also points to a recovery in profitability, thanks to falling raw-material costs, that should be worth as much as €500 a car next year.
As for managing rising materials costs, that will be everybody's headache.
Not to whitewash the challenges ahead, however; Valspar, like the rest of the specialty chemicals industry, faces rising raw materials costs that put serious pressure on margins.
Management is crediting its investments in new industrial capacity in rapidly growing global markets and its ability to recover high raw-material costs that have pushed its performance well beyond its earlier expectations for the quarter.
