Dow aims to enter SE Asian market

Dow aims to enter SE Asian market

SINGAPORE (Reuter): Dow Chemical Co, the world's largest producer of chlorine and caustic soda, is aiming to penetrate the Southeast Asian market for these products, a company official said yesterday.

"We virtually have zero market share (in Asia) and hope to move about 100,000 tons by 1999," Rod Tate, marketing manager for caustic soda Asia Pacific said in an interview.

Dow in June announced plans to build a chlorine plant in Texas, U.S., and caustic soda plant in Germany which would raise output of the two products to 6.2 million tons by 1999.

The company has around a 20-percent share in the one million ton a year Australian caustic soda market.

Tate said Dow was looking particularly at Indonesia where there was a big demand for the two products in the pulp and paper, textile and petrochemical markets.

Dow was not targeting the traditional big Asian markets such as China, South Korea or Thailand because these countries were self sufficient.

Dow sells a lot of its chlorine derivative products such as ethylene dichlorides and vinyl chloride monomer to several Asian polyvinyl chloride (PVC) producers.

Asian PVC demand is forecast to grow at five percent annually over the next few years.