Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
W.R. Grace makes specialty chemicals and materials that help refineries turn crude oil into fuel and help make everyday products like plastics, coatings, and medicines.
W.R. Grace is a chemicals company that most people have never heard of, even though its products touch their lives every day. It makes specialty chemicals and materials that other companies use to build things — mainly catalysts that help oil refineries turn crude oil into gasoline and diesel, plus silica-based materials that make products like toothpaste, paint, and plastics work better. It sells to industrial customers, not to you and me.
Its biggest business is refining catalysts. Crude oil is not useful straight out of the ground; refineries have to break it apart and reshape its molecules into fuel. Grace's catalysts speed up those chemical reactions and let refiners squeeze more high-value fuel out of every barrel. Refiners choose Grace because a small improvement in yield can be worth a lot of money at their scale, and Grace has been one of the top players in this field for decades. Grace also makes specialty silica and other materials used in everything from coatings and plastics to food packaging and pharmaceuticals. These are small, unglamorous ingredients that make a final product perform better — a little goes a long way, and customers care about getting the exact right version. The company had a rough ride. Its talc business became a legal quagmire, with thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused cancer, and that liability dragged on the company for years. In 2021, the industrial giant Standard Industries bought Grace and took it private, ending its run as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. So today Grace is a private company owned by Standard Industries, still selling the same specialty chemicals it always has — just without the stock ticker or the quarterly earnings calls.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026
see a list of the most recent 300 searches below: