DIC Berlin was founded in 1984 by a US-American chemical company and taken over in 1986 as fully owned subsidiary by Dainippon Ink & Chemicals, Inc., Tokyo, ( DIC ).

DIC was founded in 1908 as a Japanese maker of printing inks and resins, and has become a diversified and globally active chemical company that comprises over 200 subsidiaries and affiliates in more than 60 countries worldwide, including Sun Chemical Corp., USA, a leading manufacturer of pigments and inks.

As DIC's European Research Institute DIC BERLIN conducts basic research and development in polymer chemistry for the DIC Group worldwide. The R&D projects are aimed at novel products and improvements in production processes:

• for environmentally friendly systems (e.g. waterborne coatings and inks, solvent free coatings like powder coatings),
  
• to cure monomers and resins under mild, energy saving conditions (e.g. UV curable coatings and inks),
  
• to substitute conventional products by modern, less harmful ones that show lower emission of hazardous substances (e.g. formaldehyde-free crosslinking systems, polyester formulations with reduced amount of styrene monomer),
  
• to optimise manufacturing processes (e.g. improvement of pigment production to yield higher quality products, to save costs, and to reduce waste),
  
• by applying modern synthetic techniques for innovative products (e.g. liquid crystalline materials for energy saving LC displays).