Author : SpecialChem
Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive officer of The Dow Chemical Company has announced that the Company will begin construction of a new USD 100 million Innovation Center designed to drive innovation at the intersections of silicone science and organic chemistry at the heritage Dow Corning corporate campus.
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| Dow to Build Innovation Center for Silicone Science & Organic Chemistry |
Technological Innovations for Growth
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.
Liveris said:
“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. 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.”
New Innovation Center
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.
Increasing Research & Development Efforts
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.