For Dow Chemical, boosting digital sales through its B2B ecommerce and transformation strategy shouldn’t be an isolated and siloed channel experiment.
Dow already does over one-third of sales through digital channels and has ambitious plans to scale up for more.
Dow Chemical’s next steps for digital sales
“We’re scaling several of our digital solutions,” Dow chief financial officer Jeff Tate told analysts and other attendees at the corporate’s recent investor’s day meeting. “In truth, at the top of 2023, almost 40% of our sales occurred through digital channels, which is double where we were throughout the last time of our Investor Day in 2021.”
“With this, we’ve got reduced our order touches by over 20%,” Tate stated. “Importantly, all the pieces you see here is an example of structural improvements. They’re intended to be sustainable, long-term advantages that give us the pliability to speculate for the longer term.”
Dow Chemical Co. is a chemical and plastics manufacturer and considered one of the world’s biggest suppliers of chemicals, plastics, synthetic fibers and agricultural products. In 2023, Dow generated total sales of $44.6 billion, a decrease of twenty-two% from $56.9 billion in 2022.
Digital sales totals for Dow Chemical
Dow reported total annual sales of $44.6 billion. Of that sum, 40% of all sales accomplished were done electronically. Based on these numbers, Digital Commerce 360 projects Dow’s digital sales in 2023 totaled $17.84 billion.
As well as, Dow also says that 70% of sales for its consumer solutions business is electronic. The business alone generated $5.16 billion for Dow in 2023. Based on these figures, Digital Commerce 360 projects Dow’s consumer solutions digital sales in 2023 totaled $3.61 billion.
“Digital is big from a productivity standpoint for us, so we’ve got done cost-cutting over time but what we’re attempting to do is speed to market, speed to innovation, and growth without having so as to add resources, and more digital capabilities so customers can order online, track online (with) less human touches,” CEO Jim Fitterling told attendees.
Going forward, the corporate said Dow will proceed to speculate and develop more diverse types of artificial intelligence.
“We now have 20 years of deep AI technology and making catalysts for plastics and so over and over before we ever go right into a lab, we are able to computer model what we’d like to make before we ever attempt to make anything and we are able to make it a micro pilot scale and make it a mini plant scale for our customers,” Fitterling stated. “Those are the sorts of productivity we’re focused on.”
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