While AT&T's proposed $85 billion acquisition of TimeWarner is the merger most often in the news these days — in no small part thanks to President-elect Donald Trump's tweet denigrating it — the president-elect's administration will soon find itself needing to decide on an even more important merger in 2017, one that could prove critical to the future of one of his top concerns: America's manufacturing base.
Dow Chemical and Dupont, each with a market cap around $65 billion, agreed to a merger in 2015, and they are awaiting regulatory approval. The two companies together employ about 100,000 workers, roughly half of whom are in the United States. After the merger, the companies intend to divide the new entity into three separately traded entities; one will focus on agricultural markets, the second on material science and the third will concentrate on various specialty products.
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