A former packaging segment leader will take over the top spot at Dow upon the exit of Chair and CEO Jim Fitterling.
Chief Operating Officer Karen Carter will assume the CEO role on July 1, and Fitterling will become executive chair of the board at that time. Carter will also become a board member.
Carter has more than 30 years of experience at Dow. She was promoted to COO in December 2024 and previously had been president of packaging and specialty plastics — Dow’s largest unit by revenue, representing about half of the company’s sales. During her roughly two years in that role, Carter “led value growth through asset upgrades, capacity expansions and improved reliability, while advancing circular economy solutions,” according to a company news release.
“Our focus remains unwavering: delivering reliable and innovative solutions for our customers, and long-term value for our employees and our shareholders, while accelerating our transformation to set a new competitive standard for best-in-class performance,” she said in a statement.
Fitterling has been Dow’s CEO since 2018. He led the company through its spinoff from DowDuPont, a short-lived conglomerate that formed via merger in 2017 and dissolved in 2019 to create three separate companies: Dow, DuPont and Corteva.
Fitterling played a “pivotal role in reshaping Dow into a more focused, resilient and innovation-driven enterprise, with an emphasis on higher-growth, consumer demand-led markets,” according to a company news release.
The company also touted Fitterling’s work to advance Dow’s sustainability. In June 2023, the company’s sustainability report noted efforts to accelerate progress toward its goals to reduce plastic waste and emissions.
In January, the company announced that it would launch a $2 billion cost-savings program and cut 4,500 jobs. That followed Dow’s large-scale restructuring announced in January 2025, when the company cut approximately 1,500 employees as part of a $1 billion savings plan. Dow did not respond at the time to an inquiry about whether packaging segment employees were laid off.
However, company executives reported during an earnings call that month that macroeconomic conditions were creating business challenges, and the overall 2% sales dip in the fourth quarter of 2024 was led by a 6% year-over-year drop in the packaging and specialty plastics segment. Volatility in plastics pricing played a role in that decline, Carter said during the earnings call.
While Carter led the packaging segment, she oversaw multiple innovation projects. Dow announced in March 2024 that it was working with Procter & Gamble to jointly develop a dissolution technology for hard-to-recycle plastics. The plan was to use solvents to transform rigid, flexible and multilayer plastic packaging into recycled polyethylene that P&G could use in new packaging. Last year, Dow called this an “exciting development” and said the resulting polymers would have a lower greenhouse gas emissions footprint than virgin material.
In 2023, Dow announced a partnership with bioconversion company New Blue Energy to create biobased ethylene from corn stover, an agricultural waste. Dow planned to use the ethylene as a feedstock to manufacture packaging and other biobased plastic products.
