THE DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY
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The Dow Chemical Company Background The Dow Chemical Company is one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world. Its products vary from simple industrial chemicals to plastics, dyes, hydrocarbons, agricultural products to water purification technologies. The diverse nature of the company’s products coupled with its huge financial base has seen the company expand from its humble origins in Midland, Michigan in 1897. Presently, the company has production facilities and direct supply points in over one hundred and fifty countries worldwide. The company has over 50,000 employees spread throughout its facilities with the American workforce being the largest in the group. The company is listed at the New York Stock Exchange where it is publicly traded and forms part of the Dow and S&P 500 index. According to the financial results for the year 2010/11, Dow Chemicals made a profit of $2.7 billion and had revenues of close to $60 billion. It also has a total asset base of $69 billion with equity for the 2010/11 financial year standing at $23.2 billion (The Dow Chemical Company, 2012). Before diversifying its operations to other chemical products, the company first started with extracting bromine from underground brine in Midland. As a result, the company first specialized in the production of bromine derivative products such as bleach. Developments in the chemical manufacturing sector especially in the lead up to and during the Second World War saw the company diversify to the production of performance chemicals. From then on the company expanded significantly into becoming a major manufacturing player in the agricultural sector (The Dow Chemical Company, 2012). The sheer size of Dow Chemicals has meant that the company has in effect stopped selling directly to end users; instead, its main clients are other chemical manufacturing plants throughout the world. Despite this fact, the company is among
