Dow to Build Innovation Center for Silicone Science & Organic Chemistry

Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive officer of The Dow Chemical Company has 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.

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.

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.