As Chemtura moves toward closing the sale of its AgroSolutions business to U.S.-based Platform Specialty Chemicals for around $1 billion, its board has approved a share buyback program of $500 million worth of common stock.

A substantial portion of the net proceeds from the sale of the agricultural assets will be used to fund the buyback, Chemtura said. The board also has authorized debt repayment of up to $250 million following completion of the sale.

"We are positioned to quickly eliminate stranded costs arising from the sale of Chemtura AgroSolutions, but we will not complete the elimination of these costs in the fourth quarter of 2014. We do expect to have substantially completed the elimination of these costs by the end of the first quarter of 2015," said CEO Craig Robertson.

Chemtura has also announced that it will not meet its 2014 earnings target. Despite the success of many of the company's improvement initiatives, the impact of continuing weak demand conditions in some market applications, combined with the overhang of excess industry capacity in bromine and certain organometallics, "restricts the achievement of our targeted performance," Rogerson said.

"To insure we do meet our expected performance improvement in 2015, we are accelerating our initiatives to reduce our manufacturing costs," the CEO said, adding that the company has introduced an efficiency scheme to eliminate approximately $50 million in costs.

The scheme will allow Chemtura to leverage its innovation and manufacturing capacity to improve its performance in 2015 without having to rely upon recovery in demand from markets such as electronics or an the hope of better pricing, " said Rogerson.

In Q3 2014, the CEO said improvement over the 2013 quarter was less than expected, as increased volume in some applications was offset by weakness in others. Adjusted EBITDA, at $66 million, was 10% above the comparable 2013 figure. Net sales were down 2% to 8 million.