BUSINESS
SADLER RECEIVES SCI MEDAL Former Solvay America CEO discusses his two careers as chemical industry executive and advocate WILLIAM J. STORCK, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU
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HIS WEDNESDAY NIGHT, EXECU-
tives from across the chemical industry will gather at N e w a r k City's Plaza Hotel to see Whitson Sadler, 62, retired president and chiefexecutive officer of SolvayAmerica, receive the coveted Chemistry Industry Medal from the Society of Chemical Industry (American Section). The award will be given to Sadler for his "leadership as a strong advocate for the chemical industry, educating those within and outside the industry on the role of its members' products in improving lives." Sadler's tenure as head of Solvay America, the U.S. arm of Brussels-based Solvay, lasted from 1977 until his retirement at the end of 2001. His service to industry organizations was of about the same length. To understand Sadler's career, it helps to know the early history of Solvay in the U.S. Solvay entered the U.S. in 1884, forming Solvay Process Co. and building a soda ash plant in an industrial area that would become the village of Solvay, N.Y. In 1920, however, the two U.S. businesses that Solvay owned— Solvay Process and sister company Semet Solvay—along with three other chemical firms, combined to form Allied Chemical & Dyes, the predecessor firm of today's Honeywell. Although Solvay retained a 25% interest in the new company, it was essentially out of the U.S. chemical industry for the next 50 years. By the 1970s, however, Solvay wanted to reenter the U.S. market. In 1974, the company retained the investment banking firm of Lazard Frères, where Sadler was a general partner—he received an MBA from Harvard University—to identify possible acquisitions. They learned that Celanese wanted to sell its high-density polyethylene business and brought the proposal to Solvay "Everyone said that European companies were slow," Sadler says, "but we met withjacques Solvay, CEO of Solvay inJune, signed the letter of intent in September, àà
and closed the deal in November. That's pretty fast." Sadler went on the board of directors of what was then called Soltex Polymers. As he tells it, "I served on the board for a couple ofyears. In 1977,1 was sitting with Mr. Solvay on a flight to N e w a r k from Houston. He turned and asked, 'Do you want to be a banker for the rest of your life?' I told him, 'Not if you let me run that operation.' That's how I became president of what would become Solvay America. We didn't negotiate salary or anything. He offered and I just accepted." From there, Sadler went on to build a company that had $113 million in sales in 1977 into one with $2.4 billion in sales when he retired Sadler at the end of 2001. "We tried to mirror the parent company's areas of expertise, so we could tap their strong technical people," Sadler says. "They were involved in chemicals, plastics, peroxygens, and some pharmaceuticals, and those are the areas we moved into. Although, early on we acquired Salsbury Laboratories, an animal health company, instead of entering the human pharmaceuticals market." THE BASIC STRATEGYp according to Sadler, was to build businesses from scratch or to make small acquisitions that would provide a platform for growth. Small acquisitions helped in other ways. "We were very thinly staffed in the beginning," Sadler says. "All we got in the Celanese acquisition was the plant operations in Deer Park, Texas. Wé were basically using the plant guy there as our director of human resources—that sort of thing. Making smaller acquisitions helped us build our staff." In addition to the acquisition of Sals-
bury Labs in 1978, the company formed Interox America, a hydrogen peroxide producer, in partnership with Laporte of the U.K. in that same year. Solvay bought Laporte's interest in 1992 and renamed the business Solvay Interox. In 1986, Sadler led the company into the U.S. pharmaceuticals business with the acquisition of Reid Rowell Laboratories. This was bolstered with the purchase of Unimed Pharmaceuticals in 1999. And in 1990, he negotiated the purchase of a half interest in Research Polymers International from Dexter Corp. Solvay later acquired full ownership of the business and renamed it Solvay Engineered Polymers. The big acquisition for the company was the 1992 purchase of Tenneco Minerals, which represented a return, in the U.S., to Solvay's original business—soda ash. But it also brought to a head a problem that had long plagued Sadler: Because of the 1920 amalgamation forming Allied Chemical, Allied owned the rights to the Solvay name in the U.S. From the time he was named head of the company in 1977, Sadler tried to get the rights back, but Allied, he says, was very stubborn about it. Allied just wanted too much in return. Finally, in the early 1980s, Sadler learned that his company could use Solvay as part of its name but could not use it on products. Even this limited use was held up. According to Sadler: "When we filed a registration for a name change to Solvay America, our lawyer got a notice from the State of New^brk, saying we couldn't call our company Solvay America because Solvay was a place name in Newark. We had to write back quickly telling them how the town got its name. That resolved the situation." But Solvay still could not be used as a product name. "When we acquired Tenneco Minerals, I knew we had to get the rights. We could not go into the soda ash business and not be allowed to use the Solvay name. Fortunately, by 1992, Allied had softened its position and we got full rights to the name." Besides acquiring operations, Sadler did some smart selling during his tenure. One was the animal health business, in
Everything that we have, our whole existence, is chemical."
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BUSINESS which Solvay had invested about $100 million. "American Home Products, now Wyeth, came along and offered us $450 million," he says. "We had to sell out for that kind of money. And the parent com pany wanted to focus on human health." And there was Cor pus Christi Petro chemical (CCP), a joint venture formed in 1976 by Union Pa cific, ICI, and Solvay, in which Solvay owned a 25% interest. It was sold to Cain Chemical in 1987, but Cain allowed Solvay to invest $15 million, keeping the 25% in terest in CCP Nine months later, Cain was sold to Occidental Petroleum, and Sadler negotiated a price of $115 million for Solva/s interest in the operation. Sadler now smiles and says, "One hundred mil lion dollars in nine months isn't bad, is it?" Sadler believes that he had a second ca reer while at Solvay America. At the same time he was running the company, he was an active participant in industry associa tions. Sadler served on the board of the
American Chemistry Council (ACQ— formerly the Chemical Manufacturers As sociation— almost continuously for 20 years and was its chairman in 2000. He was the first CEO of a U.S. subsidiary of a foreign company to hold this position. During his chair manship, he head ed the launch of the "Good chemistry makes it possible" ad campaign and led the program's in tegration with ACC's public image, Re sponsible Care, and research initia tives. After Sadler's year as chairman, he chaired the ACC committee exam ining a proposal to merge the Ameri can Plastics Council, of which he had previously been chairman, into ACC. This merger was completed in 2002. Sadler is also a past chairman of the board of the Society of Chemical Indus try (American Section). Asked why he became so involved in in dustry associations, he first says: "It was the people. There is something special
"There is something special about the people in the chemical industry."
about the people in the chemical industry Maybe it's their education, or maybe it's because your best customer is your com petitor. These are very down-to-earth peo ple who are also very intelligent. There is a lack of pomposity in the industry" But then he adds that he came in at a time of needed change. "At my first ACC annual meeting, I saw how they were try ing to change the industry and how it was trying to become a more proactive organization. I watched ACC change and become a more professional advo cacy organization." FOR INSTANCE, he says, "I remember not long after the Bhopal disaster {in 1984} sit ting on the board and Bob Kennedy [chair man of Union Carbide, which owned the plant where the disaster occurred] brought up Responsible Care and how it was being implemented in Canada. That was some thing in itself—that he was the one to do this. But my first thought was, 'My God, Carbide has a tragedy in Bhopal and we're going to have to spend millions to put in Responsible Care.' But then we began to talk about it, and I now think it is one of
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the most important things that the indus try has done." Sadler says: "On a personal level, Re sponsible Care meant that I could now overcome the reluctance of plant man agers, who can be like ship captains, to make changes within the plants. All of a sudden, we had companies like D o w Chemical and DuPont, which has the greatest safety record in the world, and oth ers helping to draft the codes, which I could give to plant managers and tell them, This is now a condition of ACC membership, and you can't say no.' " One of the things that the attendees in New York will hear this week is Sadler's lack of tolerance for companies and peo ple that don't have respect for chemicals. "I have always admired Dow for keeping 'Chemical' in its corporate name. That took some guts." And, in a similar vein, he says he is very happy that Solvay America last month, in consolidating its chemical operations, decided to call the new unit "Solvay Chemicals." When it comes to people with no re spect for the contributions that chemicals have made to society, Sadler has strong opinions. "We are chemicals," he says. "I have a T-shirt that has a human figure on the back and shows its chemical makeup. And it says, Ί am chemical.' "Everything that we have, our whole ex istence, is chemical," he says. "Yet the en vironmental activists have turned the word chemical into a bad word. It just infuriates me. It's wrong. It shouldn't happen. We've been taken advantage of by environmen tal activists in this country At some point we, as an industry, are going to have to find a way to go around the activists and appeal directly to the public." SADLER LOOKS at the advertising program run by the American Plastics Council in the 1990s as "an incredible success" in turning public attitudes. 'APC research," he says, "found that people liked plastics, but, be cause of environmentalist pressures, felt guilty about using them. When the ads came out showing people the wonderful things that plastics could do, the guilt went away and people were selecting plastics again." The attitude toward chemicals that Sadler perceives is one of the reasons CMA became ACC. "We wanted to have a good dialogue with various stakeholders," he says. "I remember going into a congress man's office and telling him I was from the Chemical Manufacturers Association. His eyes just glazed over. The conversation was over. But when I said American Chemistry Council, he would listen. HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
"The nice thing about the American Chemistry Council name," Sadler says, "is that it implies more than manufac turing—but that's another thing the pub lic doesn't realize. More than a manufac turing industry, we're a research industry" In his years in the chemical industry, Sadler earned the respect, as evidenced by the award he is receiving, of his indus try colleagues. He also earned the respect of those who worked for him. David G. Birney, who succeeded Sadler as presi dent and CEO of Solvay America, says:
"In the nearly 25 years I worked with him, W h i t was always a leader who was able to see the overall picture and make diffi cult decisions. He always had an instinc tive feel for business that he relied on to make those big decisions. "But at the same time," Birney says, "it was great working with a CEO like Whit. His practice was to select the right business leaders and then give them a lot of latitude to run their operations. He always believed that the people closest to the scene made the best choices." •
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