Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. (Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Laurence Alexander with Jefferies.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi. This is Lucy Watson fitting in for Laurence today. Would you mind providing and update on capacity utilization and if possible by segment?
Patrick Prevost
Thank you. In terms of the Rubber Black business, which is the dominant business in our portfolio, we believe that current industry utilizations are somewhere in the high 70%, perhaps lower 80% around the world. With regard to perhaps more granularity by region, I'm going to ask Dave to provide some comments.
David Miller
So let me start with a recap of what we have seen with our Rubber Blacks sales this past quarter around the globe. Again, we started growth in all regions. Eddy gave you the details of our sequential volume increases. But in summary, Japan, China and South America saw the greatest increases. Europe, North America, Southeast Asia saw the lowest increases. So if now look at what we've done with our restructuring activity, we've taken lower efficiency capacity out of North America and Europe and built new world-class capacity in China.
So this positions us with more cost efficient set of assets, redistributed into the higher growth regions and more properly sized in the lower growth regions. We now plan to run these higher efficiency units hard and that's exactly what we've been doing in recent months. As Patrick mentioned, we believe the industry is running in the high 80s ... I'm sorry ... high 70s, low 80s range. And we're running several percentage points above the industry average in all the regions in which we operate.
Patrick Prevost
And concerning the other businesses, I don't believe that the utilization rate is major fact, considering that these are specialty chemicals or more margin driven businesses that are driven by customer applications.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. And then could you I guess address pricing trends and Performance Products and Fumed Metal Oxides?
Patrick Prevost
We -- thank you for your question; we are very pleased with the margin trends in the performance segment. And as you can see, the performance, the financial performance is reflecting that, especially considering that the volumes in performance segment are still in the 15 to 20% below the first half of 2008 levels. So, very good development in that respect. Sean, would you like to add any thing to that?
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