Dow Corning Corporation, was an American

multinational corporation A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, i ...

headquartered in

Midland, Michigan Midland is a city in and the county seat of Midland County, Michigan. The city's population was 42,547 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal city of the Midland Micropolitan Statistical Area, part of the larger Saginaw-Midland-Bay City Com ...

, United States. Originally established as a joint venture between

The Dow Chemical Company The Dow Chemical Company, officially Dow Inc., is an American multinational corporation, multinational chemical corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. The company is among the three List of largest chemical producers, larges ...

and

Corning Incorporated Corning Incorporated is an American multinational technology company that specializes in specialty glass, ceramics, and related materials and technologies including advanced optics, primarily for industrial and scientific applications. The co ...

, Dow bought out Corning and Dow Corning became a 100% Dow subsidiary. After a brief existence as a

DowDuPont DuPont de Nemours, Inc., commonly shortened to DuPont, is an American multinational chemical company first formed in 1802 by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours. The company played a major role in ...

-owned company, as Dow spun out from DowDuPont on April 1, 2019, it is now a new company,

Dow Silicones Corporation Dow or DOW may refer to: Business * Dow Jones Industrial Average, or simply the Dow, a stock market index * Dow Inc., an American commodity chemical company ** Dow Chemical Company, a subsidiary, an American multinational chemical corporation ...

, which is wholly owned by Dow and specializes in silicone and

silicon Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic ta ...

-based technology, and is the largest silicone product producer in the world.

History

Dow Corning was formally established in 1943 as a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and economic risk, risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four rea ...

between the American conglomerates Dow Chemical and Corning Glass to explore the potential of silicone and was a manufacturer of products for use by the U.S. military in World War II. The company began operating its first plant, in Midland, MI, in 1945. Dr. E. C. Sullivan was named president, and Dr. William R. Collings was named general manager in 1943. Dr. Collings later became president from 1954 until 1962. It expanded into Canada and Europe in 1948, and into South America and Japan in 1961. A large, majority-owned subsidiary of Dow Corning Corporation is the

Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation Hemlock Semiconductor (HSC) is the largest and only producer of hyper-pure polysilicon headquartered in the United States. Founded in 1961, it is owned by Corning Inc. and Shin-Etsu Handotai and named after Hemlock, Michigan, the location of its f ...

. It is one of the world's largest producers of high-purity polycrystalline silicon, which is sold in varying purity grades for use in both

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...

silicon wafer In electronics, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si), used for the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in photovoltaics, to manufacture solar cells. The wafer serv ...

manufacture and

photovoltaics Photovoltaics (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. The photovoltaic effect is commercially ...

applications as solar cells. On November 13, 2014, The Dow Chemical Company's former CEO

Andrew N. Liveris Andrew N. Liveris (born 5 May 1954) is an Australian former CEO and chairman of The Dow Chemical Company of Midland, Michigan. Liveris has been a member of Dow's board of directors since February 2004, CEO since November 2004 and was elected as ...

revealed in a presentation to investors that Corning Incorporated intended to exit the joint venture of 71 years, citing other priorities. Following the December 11, 2015 announcement that it would merge with DuPont, Dow also announced on the same day that it had reached a deal to acquire Corning's stake in Dow Corning in exchange for $4.8 billion in cash and Corning gaining a roughly 40% stake in Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation. Dow Chemical assumed full ownership of Dow Corning on June 1, 2016. The company changed its name to

in 2018.

Products

Dow Corning marketed over 7000 products, including various sealants, adhesives, rubbers, lubricants, silicon oils and solvents. Around 2,100 of these are available through the Dow Corning online-only distributor Xiameter, including fluids, gels, resins. The range of industries targeted by Dow Corning products spans from electronics and automotive to construction, healthcare and others. In recent years, the company has expanded production of solar cells, particularly through its majority stake in

, which accounts for a polysilicon franchise worth over $1 billion. In 2011, then-CTO Gregg Zank explained that the company tries to focus its product development on societal “megatrends” (e.g. energy scarcity and urbanization).

Problems with breast implants

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s,

class-action A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class action ...

lawsuits claimed that Dow Corning's silicone breast implants caused systemic health problems. The claims first centered on

breast cancer Breast cancer is cancer that develops from breast tissue. Signs of breast cancer may include a lump in the breast, a change in breast shape, dimpling of the skin, milk rejection, fluid coming from the nipple, a newly inverted nipple, or a r ...

and then migrated to a range of autoimmune diseases, including lupus,

rheumatoid arthritis Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a long-term autoimmune disorder that primarily affects joints. It typically results in warm, swollen, and painful joints. Pain and stiffness often worsen following rest. Most commonly, the wrist and hands are invol ...

and various neurological problems. This led to numerous lawsuits beginning in 1984 and culminating in a 1998 multibillion-dollar class action settlement.Chronology of silicone breast implants
''Frontline'' As a result, Dow Corning was in bankruptcy protection for nine years, ending in June 2004 during which time it largely withdrew from clinical markets. Although a number of independent reviews, including the Institute of Medicine in the United States, subsequently indicated that silicone breast implants do not cause breast cancers or any identifiable systemic diseases, on 21 March 2017, the FDA issued a statement indicating that women with breast implants have a "very low but increased risk" of getting a rare form of cancer called

anaplastic large-cell lymphoma Anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) refers to a group of non-Hodgkin lymphomas in which aberrant T cells proliferate uncontrollably. Considered as a single entity, ALCL is the most common type of peripheral lymphoma and represents ~10% of all pe ...

(ALCL). The cancer is associated with nine deaths, the FDA said. These findings have caused an uptick in breast implant removal surgeries.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Chemical companies of the United States Corning Inc. Dow Chemical Company Joint ventures Companies based in Michigan Midland, Michigan 1943 establishments in Michigan American companies established in 1943 Manufacturing companies established in 1943