Dow's contract unit gets corporate go-ahead to grow

Abstract

Dow Chemical's three-year-old contract manufacturing services (CMS) business has received the corporate green light on a strategy for becoming one of the major custom manufacturers of pharmaceutical, agricultural, and specialty chemicals. According to Sheldon Messing and Gwin Bompas, commercial development managers for CMS, the executive committee of Dow's board of directors recently approved CMS's plan for expansion in three key custom manufacturing sectors. Among the plan's targets, they say, is severalfold growth by the middle or latter part of the next decade. CMS's track record so far indicates that such a lofty goal may not be far-fetched. Executives anticipate that CMS sales this year will approach $200 million, more than double what they were when Dow assembled the business in late 1995. The announcement of the business' formation, Messing says, came soon after Dow sold its Marion Merrell Dow pharmaceutical arm to Germany's Hoechst in mid-1995. Dow had quietly performed contract manufacturing fo...