Dow to invest US$100M in innovation centre

The Dow Chemical Company will begin construction of a new US$100M Innovation Centre for silicone science and organic chemistry at the heritage Dow Corning corporate campus.

The new facility will staff approximately 200 research and development employees.

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.

Andrew Liveris, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dow, 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.”

The new innovation centre is central to Dow achieving its initial US$100M growth synergy target.

This added R&D power will be in addition to Dow’s 1200 researchers and developers already based in the Great Lakes Bay Region.

The research efforts 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.

These investments further illustrate Dow’s long-term commitment to investing and growing in Michigan’s Great Lakes Bay Region, as the Company has also opened its new global headquarters building in Midland: a state-of-the-art, 184,000 square-feet, six-storey building that will host approximately 470 employees and contractors.

Over 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.