Ashland Inc., a specialty chemical company, provides specialty chemicals, technologies, and insights for customer needs worldwide. It operates through four segments: Ashland Specialty Ingredients, Ashland Water Technologies, Ashland Performance Materials, and Ashland Consumer Markets. The Ashland Specialty Ingredients segment offers products, technologies, and resources for solving formulation and product-performance challenges in personal care, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, coatings, construction, and energy markets. It provides solutions using natural, synthetic, and semisynthetic polymers derived from plant and seed extract, cellulose ethers, and vinyl pyrrolidones for consumer and industrial applications. The Ashland Water Technologies segment supplies specialty chemicals to the pulp and paper, commercial and institutional, mining, chemicals, general manufacturing, and municipal wastewater-treatment industries. The Ashland Performance Materials segment offers unsaturated polyester resins and epoxy vinyl ester resins, gelcoats, pressure-sensitive and structural adhesives, specialty coatings, and elastomers serving the construction, transportation, infrastructure, packaging and converting, and energy markets. It also provides metal casting consumables and design services for foundry management. The Ashland Consumer Markets segment produce and distributes automotive, commercial, and industrial lubricants and car-care products. It operates and franchises approximately 860 Valvoline Instant Oil Change centers in the United States. This segment also markets Valvoline lubricants and automotive chemicals, MaxLife lubricants for cars with higher mileage engines, NextGen motor oil, SynPower synthetic motor oil, Eagle One and Car Brite automotive appearance products, and Zerex antifreeze. The company was founded in 1924 and is headquartered in Covington, Kentucky.