Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The American (Washington, DC)

Movin' out: an Australian dedicated to American values, Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical, has been shifting plants overseas as U.S. natural gas prices make domestic manufacturing uncompetitive.

Article Excerpt
SINCE 2004, ANDREW LIVERIS has been chief executive officer of the Dow Chemical Company, the giant chemicals and plastics manufacturer with $49 billion in revenues and 43,000 employees around the world. Dow, founded in 1897 in Midland, Michigan, and still headquartered there, seems the quintessentially Middle-American company, but Liveris is the fifth of the past six Dow CEOs to be born outside the United States--in his case, in Darwin, in Australia's remote Northern Territory. He received his engineering degree from the University of Queensland, joined Dow in Melbourne in 1976, and spent much of his career in Asia. He and his wife Paula have three children.

Under his stewardship, Dow has moved vast manufacturing operations overseas--a development about which Liveris is not entirely sanguine.

THE AMERICAN: Andrew, will the chemical industry continue to be a vital part of the American economy?

Andrew Liveris: Petrochemistry, which is an industry based on chemicals that are made from oil and gas, will increasingly diminish its footprint because of America's lack of competitiveness in natural gas, particularly. Our industry used to be the second-largest exporter of American goods outside aviation and aerospace. But that...