Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive officer of The Dow Chemical Company, announced that the Company will begin construction of a new, $100 million Innovation Center designed to drive innovation at the intersections of silicone science and organic chemistry at the heritage Dow Corning corporate campus.
The new facility will host approximately 200 research and development employees who will explore future technologies at the intersections of silicone chemistry and Dow’s unparalleled knowledge of materials science and organic chemistry. Dow, which started exploring silicone chemistry nearly 80 years ago upon creating the Dow Corning joint venture, enhanced its ability to combine these technologies after completing the ownership restructuring of Dow Corning in June, 2016.
“This is a monumental day for Dow, our employees and for Michigan as it marks another tremendous milestone in our company’s more than 120 year history,” said Liveris. ”This world-class facility could have been located anywhere and we chose to invest right here in Michigan because both the U.S. and the state have a growing and vibrant research, development and manufacturing sector creating new opportunities every day.”
The new innovation center will be a key enabler in Dow achieving its initial $100 million growth synergy target, as well as more than $500 million of additional Dow-enabled bottom-line growth the Company now expects to achieve across the enterprise from integrating silicones into the Dow portfolio. This bottom-line growth, coupled with Dow’s latest cost synergy target of more than $650 million, greatly enhance silicones’ profitability. Dow now expects EBITDA to increase to more than $2 billion by the end of 2019 – more than double its initial projection.
This added R&D power will complement the work of Dow’s more than 1,200 researchers and developers already based in the Great Lakes Bay Region, to focus on market opportunities such as advancing technologies for home and personal care products, enhancing and broadening Dow’s energy-saving building technologies, advancing materials science for critical infrastructure and driving closer partnerships with customers and value chain leaders.
Liveris first announced the project in December, 2016, at a Grand Rapids, Mich. event with then U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump.
These investments further illustrate Dow’s long-term commitment to investing and growing in Michigan’s Great Lakes Bay Region, as the Company also celebrated today the grand opening of its new global headquarters building in Midland - a state-of-the-art, 184,000 square-feet, six-story building that will host approximately 470 employees and contractors.
During the last 10 years, Dow and its regional development partners have driven more than $400 million of investment and downtown economic redevelopment in the Great Lakes Bay Region, home to the Company and nearly 13,000 of its employees and contractors.
Dow has created more than 10,000 direct and indirect jobs in the United States in the last four years alone. A significant portion of that job creation is the result of the Company’s more than $6 billion of manufacturing investments currently underway on the U.S. Gulf Coast, which employed 7,000 construction workers at the construction peak and will result in 500 full-time Dow jobs. Dow recently announced a next phase of strategic investments spread over the next five years, extending Dow’s U.S. growth investments to more than $12 billion over a 10-year period. These will support job creation in the U.S., reaching approximately 3,500 construction jobs and creating 200 full-time technical, vocational and professional careers, further supporting nearly 2,000 jobs across the broader economy(1).
About Dow
Dow (NYSE: DOW) combines the power of science and technology to passionately innovate what is essential to human progress. The Company is driving innovations that extract value from material, polymer, chemical and biological science to help address many of the world's most challenging problems, such as the need for fresh food, safer and more sustainable transportation, clean water, energy efficiency, more durable infrastructure, and increasing agricultural productivity. Dow's integrated, market-driven portfolio delivers a broad range of technology-based products and solutions to customers in 175 countries and in high-growth sectors such as packaging, infrastructure, transportation, consumer care, electronics, and agriculture. In 2016, Dow had annual sales of $48 billion and employed approximately 56,000 people worldwide. The Company's more than 7,000 product families are manufactured at 189 sites in 34 countries across the globe. References to "Dow" or the "Company" mean The Dow Chemical Company and its consolidated subsidiaries unless otherwise expressly noted. More information about Dow can be found at www.dow.com.
(1) The American Chemistry Council estimates that every job created from the business of chemistry creates more than 6 jobs in other sectors across the rest of the economy.
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