One of the most stunning materials stories of 2007 has been the transfer of American plastics assets to oil powers in the Mideast. I’ve already written in detail about the acquisition of the iconic GE Plastics business by the Saudi Basic Industries Corp. Now comes Dow’s decision to sell half of key plastics businesses for $9.5 billion to the Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Covered were Dow’s ownership of these product groups: polyethylene, ethylenamines, ethanolamines, polypropylene, and polycarbonate. The assets will be owned by a company that will be established late next year in the United States. It will employ 5,000 people and generate about $11 billion in annual sales. Earlier this month, Dow announced plans to exit all non-automotive ABS business in the Americas. Dow divested other styrenics business and announced several other closings Dec. 4. "Today’s announcement reflects our commitment to prune businesses that are not delivering appropriate value and tackle tasks more efficiently across the entire organization … freeing up capital and resources that will be re- directed toward value-creating growth opportunities," said Andrew N. Liveris, Dow’s chairman and chief executive officer.
The moves by GE and Dow are not surprises. It may come as a surprise to users, but plastics assets have not yielded satisfactory returns on investment in recent years. GE’s corporate outlook is already looking better, and you can expect a healthier, trimmed-down Dow in 2008. It’s also not a surprise that Mideast oil powers are interested buyers of the more attractive assets. US-based properties are available at attractive prices because of the low value of the US dollar. Foreign economies are flush with dollars because of our ongoing trade deficit.
Is this bad news for the design engineering community? Decidedly not. GE Plastics made its public debut at K 2007 as Sabic Innovative Plastics. Key officials stayed on board and are talking enthusiastically about growth in several areas, including even photovoltaic cells. The plastics business had not been a favorable target as part of GE. Now it is. The Dow plastics business will benefit from an improved cost position with a significant Kuwait footprint.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
16 
