Dec 17 2004
The Dow Chemical Company and Symyx Technologies, Inc., today announced a five-year strategic alliance agreement to enhance research and development activity within Dow through high throughput experimentation technologies and informatics solutions provided by Symyx. This expansion of the two companies’ relationship builds upon a six-year history of collaborative research that resulted in the discovery of innovative catalysts now used in the manufacture of Dow’s VERSIFY* plastomers and elastomers launched earlier this year.
This alliance agreement enables a company wide commitment by Dow to high throughput research and R&D informatics solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Symyx will perform research in a number of exclusive areas, develop and provide Symyx Discovery Tools®, and license Symyx’s Renaissance® suite of software as well as certain intellectual property. Dow will make payments to Symyx over the five-year term of approximately $120 million. Symyx expects that approximately 40% of this revenue will be service revenue, 30% product revenue and 30% license revenue. In addition, Symyx will also receive royalties on commercialized discoveries resulting from the collaborative research.
“Our collaborative work with Symyx employing high throughput experimentation methods has already delivered tangible results,” said Kurt Swogger, Vice President, Plastics R&D, of The Dow Chemical Company. “Dow’s R&D Council believes embracing high throughput techniques throughout our R&D organization and unifying R&D data under one informatics platform will make our R&D efforts more productive and innovative.”
“We welcome the opportunity to align strategically with Dow, and we are ready to deliver significant value to Dow through R&D productivity and innovation offerings,” said Steven Goldby, chairman and chief executive officer of Symyx. “We believe this broad alliance will exemplify the impact our proprietary technologies can have on global R&D organizations, in particular on their ability to advantage our customers competitively. We look forward to supporting Dow in further enhancing its research and development efforts.”
Symyx and Dow have worked together in research collaboration since January 1999, including previous extensions in June, 2002 and in July, 2004. Dow began commercial production of its family of VERSIFY* plastomers and elastomers in Tarragona, Spain in September, 2004. This new family of specialty propylene-ethylene copolymers is manufactured using a new catalyst system discovered in a collaboration between Dow and Symyx, combined with Dow’s proprietary INSITE* technology. Symyx expects to earn royalties from the sale of these polymers starting in the first quarter of 2005.
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