Morning folks,
DowDuPont has officially named the three companies that will be spun off this year and next.
One company will be known as DuPont, the second Dow, and the third, Corteva. DuPont and Corteva will be based in Delaware.
While I am sure there was some back and forth, it was evident that abandoning the Dow and DuPont names would have been ill-advised.
The process got trickier when it came to agriculture, the main driver of the DowDuPont merger.
DuPont has a powerful brand in Iowa-based Pioneer, which recently had gone by the name DuPont Pioneer. But the brand might not have worked for crop protection products.
Enter Cortiva, a name with a more worldly flair.
To one reader, the Corteva name brought to mind Corfam, a DuPont artificial leather product that was not one of DuPont’s success stories.
Corfam was sold off by DuPont after an unsuccessful marketing effort. The material still keeps a nice shine with minimal effort Shoes with the material still shows up in police and military circles. There is even a 1940s-style zoot suit website that features flashy Corfam shoes.
Meanwhile, the collection of companies that will be now under the Dow and DuPont umbrellas will see some tweaking and rebranding.
Investors will want to know if the spin-offs live up to their potential and come with product development pipelines that turn out more Kevlars than Corfams.
Enjoy your hump day. Our newsletter returns tomorrow. – Doug Rainey, publisher
