Letter from Asia-Pacific Management

Since the last Pacific Public Report, Dow’s local operations have been restructured into three regions – Japan/Korea, Greater China, and Australasia/Southeast Asia. However, there is no lessening of our continued commitment to build transparency and accountability in the spirit of Sustainable Development, and we will continue to report progress across all three regions.

The recent organisational restructuring in Dow Pacific — as elsewhere in Dow — aims to ensure that Dow responds well in pursuit of our region-specific objectives, especially growth. By sharpening our geographic focus in Asia-Pacific we can further strengthen our leadership presence across this important region and optimise the opportunities it has to offer.

We are proud to share with you our 2003 public report, which continues the tradition begun in 1999 to communicate openly with our customers and other important stakeholders not just our achievements, but also our goals and challenges as we strive to improve our effectiveness against all three elements of sustainability — namely economic, environmental, and social performance.

As the business environment in Asia-Pacific gradually recovers, we continue to focus on strengthening our low-cost-to-serve position by building on our restructured global business model and on staying close to our customers. The Economic Prosperity section of this report provides detail of how we are striving to meet the needs of our customers with cost competitive and quality products, and grow our business in the region, despite the very challenging economic environment in 2003.

As a good corporate citizen we also work hard to improve the safety and environmental performance of our plants and the communities they serve. We are pleased to report that over the last year our rate of personal injuries and motor vehicle accidents in Asia-Pacific were the lowest on record, and we continue to see improvement in many other measurements, which are covered in detail elsewhere in this report.

Despite Dow facing one of its most difficult years in terms of financial results in 2003, we managed to continue investing in communities through our corporate contribution programme and the year saw completion of projects such as protecting rare butterflies in Australia and endangered turtles in Malaysia; supporting education programmes including those in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia and Korea; supporting establishment of a new family services centre in Hong Kong; providing aid to help front-line health professionals combat SARS; and a major contribution for flood relief in Eastern China. All these programmes were supported by our employees and communities committing their time to make things happen, and this report highlights other community projects undertaken in 2003 in the section entitled Corporate Social Responsibility.

Dow is very proud of what has been achieved in Asia-Pacific and, as leaders of the three new local regional organisations, we remain committed to sustaining and expanding these achievements.

Takashi Kaminaga
Regional Leader
Japan/Korea

Jim McIlvenny
President
Greater China

Jim Fitterling
Regional Leader
Australasia/Southeast Asia