DuPont (DD): A Leaner Materials Leader Emerges

The Importance Of Chemicals

Modern civilization is supported by some well-known and obvious key technologies like the combustion engine, electric motors, antibiotics, and so on. It is also supported by much less-known but no less essential specialty chemicals and materials.

These materials provide unique physical and/or chemical characteristics that make them often absolutely irreplaceable for the production of clean water, electronics, buildings, vehicles, planes, etc.

Most of the time, these chemicals are either under the protection of a patent or covered by a trademark, giving pricing power to the company that invented them.

Still, at the same time, many of these chemicals are at risk of being commoditized when the patent expires, which means that low production costs are equally essential to ensure a durable advantage of the brand over its competitors for decades after the discovery.

In the chemical industry, low production costs are often synonymous with production at scale, leading to the industry evolving toward a few dozen giant producers controlling most of the world’s market.

Due to these economic incentives, large and established chemical companies tend to be more profitable and provide superior returns to their shareholders. And one company has been for more than two centuries at the forefront of chemical production innovation: DuPont de Nemours.

DuPont History

Early Days

DuPont de Nemours, often abbreviated as DuPont, was founded in 1802 by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours. The company quickly rose to become a preeminent provider of gunpowder to the newly independent nation, using gunpowder machinery imported from France.

It notably supplied half the gunpowder used by the Union Army during the American Civil War. Later on, DuPont diversified into other explosives, including those for civilian use.

Source: Project Gutenberg

Into A Chemical Giant

In the 1910s, the company started to diversify, notably exploring chemicals using cellulose (wood pulp), lacquers, etc. In the 1920s, it invented artificial silk (also called viscose or Rayon) and cellophane.

In the following years, the company would be involved in the invention of neoprene, polyester, Teflon, and nylon. It also started the production of synthetic ammonia and insecticides.

DuPont would also be essential in developing textiles for the space program and other advanced materials, notably  Kevlar, Mylar, Dacron, Orlon, Lycra, Tyvek, Nomex, Qiana, Corfam, and Corian.

Meanwhile, the company owned a part of General Motors (GM +0.02%) until the 1950s, acquired the oil company Conoco in 1981 (resold in 1999) to secure oil feedstock for the rest of its chemical plants, and acquired the large seed business Pioneer Hi-Bred in 1999.

Refocusing

While scale is generally a good thing in the chemical industry, it can be argued that DuPont pushed the concept a little too far.

At some point, it became more of a bloated conglomerate without any strategic focus.

As a result, the company has been continuously divesting major assets throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Among notable divestments can be mentioned:

• The sale of the pharmaceutical division to  Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY -0.02%) in 2001.
• The sale of the consumer textile business to Koch Industries in 2004.
• The spin-off of titanium and refrigerant products into Chemours in 2015. (CC +0.61%).
• The spin-off of the agriculture division into Corteva Agrisciences(CTVA +1.43%) (follow the link for a full report of this company).

The period was not just selling assets, but a sale of legacy products and a re-centering around innovation and new business as well. It was also a period of acquisition and mergers:

• The acquisition of the Danish company Danisco for $6.3B.
• The merger with another chemical giant, Dow Chemical, in 2015, resulting in the complex corporate engineering of immediately splitting the resulting company into 3 different companies, bringing together the corresponding activities from both Dow and DuPont:
  • Corteva Agrisciences (CTVA +1.43%) for seeds and agricultural chemicals.
  • Dow Chemical (DOW -0.08%) for specialty chemicals.
  • DuPont for high-performance materials.

Source: DuPont

This complex history of divestments, spin-offs, mergers, acquisitions & reorganization has led to today’s DuPont, a much more focused and easy-to-understand company.

Source: DuPont

DuPont 2025: Portfolio, Guidance & Targets

Sales, Headcount & Patents (Post-Spin Guidance)

The newly reorganized DuPont is a company employing 13,000+ employees, holding 5,100 patents, and making $6.9B in sales in 2025.

Each of the current segments (healthcare, water, and industries) is centered on markets and technologies with a strong growth profile and underlying trend of rewarding high-performance materials over just low costs.

As a result, the company expects organic sales growth to stand at 3-4%, not counting new products.

The company keeps a target of 35-45% dividend payout ratio and returns cash to shareholders through share repurchases, supported by an 8-10% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) in earnings per share. It also aims to spend 3% of sales on capital expenditures.

As a whole, the company makes half of its revenues in North America, with healthcare, water, and construction each at around 1/4^th of total revenues.

Source: DuPont

R&D Pipeline, AI in Materials & New-to-Market Sales

The company is dedicating 2.5% of its sales to R&D throughout its 19 R&D and innovation centers in the world, employing more than 800 researchers.

Almost a third of current sales ($2.2B) are coming from products created after 2020.

The company is now fully embracing AI for both better management of the supply chain & product lifecycle, and to speed up innovation in material science.

Qnity Spin-Off Timeline & Scope

DuPont announced initially in 2024 that it would be splitting into three publicly traded companies, separating its electronics and water businesses while continuing as a diversified industrial firm.

This plan somewhat changed since, with the announcement in 2025 that the revised plan will keep the water division, targeting only the separation from the electronic business in November 2025.

Qnity will be the name for the spin-off electronic division, with the expected ticker “Q” for the listing on the NYSE stock market. (Q -1.87%)

DuPont Segments

Without semiconductor and electronic chemicals, DuPont will be a company with activity in healthcare, water, and industrial chemicals.

Source: DuPont

The healthcare segment is mostly focused not on producing pharmaceutical drugs, but high-performance packaging, materials for medical devices, etc.

The water segment focuses on municipal and industrial water production; both use membranes to remove unwanted compounds from water.

The industrial segment is the largest in total revenues, but also the most diverse, covering industries as varied as automotive, photovoltaic, aerospace, building, energy, packaging, etc.
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DuPont Healthcare

90% of the top 25 medical device companies in the US use DuPont’s technologies, especially for sterile packaging, surgery tools, etc.

This segment includes notably the Tyvek brand, which also covers professional protective gear & clothing, anti-mite mattress material, as well as Styrofoam insulation and other solutions to cover buildings.

Source: DuPont Tyvek

More than 200 million Tyvek garments are used every year in almost every existing industry.

The Nomex protective gear against fire, a popular solution for firemen, and Kevlar, used in bulletproof gear, are going to be divested to the company Arclin for $1.8B in a deal announced in August 2025 to sell all of Dupont’s aramid-based chemicals.

The largest market for this segment is North America, with medical packaging the largest application.

Source: DuPont

DuPont Water

Water purification at the municipal level is roughly done using one of three different techniques:

• Chlorine and other oxidizing chemicals, or UV lights, usually done today only as a complement to other methods or in small, isolated water stations.
• Ozone generation, using electricity to generate ozone and kill bacteria and oxidize harmful chemicals, an established technology, but often with higher operating costs due to high energy consumption.
• Membranes, the most modern technology, able to selectively filter bacteria or specific chemicals out of the water.

For industrial water production, membrane filtration is the dominant technology as well.

DuPont tripled the number of patents in that segment in the past 5 years, reflecting its innovation process in advanced membrane and resin technologies.

Source: DuPont

The company’s products cover every possible type of membrane-based filtration system, from removing large particles and bacteria to smaller particles and dissolved ions.

Source: DuPont

DuPont Technology is used to process 50 million gallons of water every minute. As much as 60% of global ultrapure water used for semiconductor processing is purified using DuPont’s ion exchange resins.

The technology can also be used for desalination, a quickly growing market as water demand grows in many countries with limited freshwater resources.

For example, DuPont membranes were chosen in 2021 at the world’s largest desalination plant at the Soreq plant in Tel Aviv, Israel, or at the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant in Florida, the largest of its kind in the USA.

Asia Pacific (APAC) is the largest market for this segment, with industrial water and life science among the largest customers.

Source: DuPont

The company expects new markets to contribute to the sector growth, like direct lithium extraction, green hydrogen, and removal of PFAS (“forever chemicals”).

DuPont Industrial Materials

This segment is roughly split into two: construction materials and industrial technologies.

Source: DuPont

The construction segment includes Tyvek’s panels, but also a wide array of isolation foams (Great Stuff and Froth Pak) and solid surfaces for interior design (Corian).

This construction is dominated by the North American market, making up more than 3/4^th of total sales.

Source: DuPont

The industrial segment creates specialty materials for high-demand applications. Its largest market is North America, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific, with automotive and industrial/aerospace the largest customers.

Source: DuPont

It covers many critical applications:

Vespel: Polyimide parts for aerospace components, semiconductor processing, automotive manufacturing, and energy production, with mass production of 80 million pieces per year. It offers lighter weight as well as improved durability and sealing capacity thanks to superior resistance to heat, vibration, friction, wear, compression, weight, impacts, etc.

Tedlar: Surface protection of plastic films, pipes, solar panels, commercial billboards, vehicles, hospital and airplane surfaces, etc.

MOLYKOTE: lubricants for avoiding friction and damage of moving parts in any conditions, including harsh chemicals, freezing, wet, dust & dirt, electrical currents, contact with food, etc.

Cyrel: for flexographic printing systems, used to create high-quality packaging for beverages, food, packages, cosmetics, signage, paper & cardboard, etc.

As the global airline fleet is expected to nearly double by 2044, more DuPont material will be used for parts as well. DuPont also benefits from the switch to EVs, which require 2x more DuPont material than ICE vehicles.

Source: DuPont

Acquisition Strategy

Unsurprisingly, considering the history of the company, DuPont is looking to perform strategic acquisitions to deepen its product portfolio and market penetration in its newly refocused sectors.

The priority for the company’s management is for now in healthcare and water segments, with a focus on creating synergies with the existing product line and/or the ability of the acquired companies to scale their activity.

For example, DuPont acquired in September 2025 Sinochem (Ningbo) RO Memtech Co. to expand its reverse osmosis (RO) manufacturing footprint into China and the Asia Pacific region.

“This acquisition aligns with our strategy to enhance our global manufacturing capabilities for FilmTec™ RO elements and better serve our customers in China and the Asia Pacific region.”

Jeroen Bloemhard, President of DuPont’s Healthcare & Water Technologies segment

Other acquisitions that can be mentioned include:

• Donatelle: a medical device contract manufacturer, acquired in 2024.
• Spectrum Plastics: an advanced manufacturer of specialty medical devices and components, with a focus on structural heart, electrophysiology, surgical robotics, and cardiovascular, acquired in 2023.

Controversies

As a long-established, leading chemical company, DuPont’s history is dotted with scandals and controversies around pollution and environmental damage.

For example, the company was a major producer of CFC (chlorofluorocarbons), a class of refrigerants that was responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.

It has also been producing Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a forever chemical, was a producer of GMO seeds and of the herbicide Imprelis (removed from market for damaging trees), and has been the target of multiple lawsuits for pollution.

On this topic, the likely most impactful litigation for investors is concerning PFAS (“forever chemical), with DuPont, Chemour, and Corteva (and 3M (MMM +1.77%) having paid $1.2B in 2023 to settle pollution trials.

“Even as DuPont and Chemours had information about the toxic impacts of PFAS on human health and drinking water, the companies continued to produce and discharge PFAS.

DuPont and Chemours appear to have impermissibly captured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and delayed its efforts to properly regulate PFAS chemicals.”

UN Experts for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

In 2025, DuPont agreed to a record-breaking $2.5 billion settlement to resolve PFAS contamination claims across multiple sites in New Jersey.

So, while (probably) not as dramatic as the endless lawsuits for the likely cancer-causing herbicide RoundUp from Bayer (BAYN.DE), which have crashed Bayer’s stock for almost a decade, after it acquired Monsanto, the PFAS litigation should stay in the mind of potential investors interested in DuPont, and as a cautionary tale.

Source: Yahoo Finance

Conclusion

DuPont is one of the oldest chemical corporations in the world, having invented a significant portion of the synthetic materials in use today.

It is now reaching the final stage of a long phase of reinvention and reorganization that saw it divesting or selling most of its most iconic inventions and brands, from Kevlar to refrigerants. It has also exited the explosive, titanium, electronics, agricultural, and pharmaceutical drugs businesses.

The resulting company is much closer to the original DuPont than the massive conglomerate of the past years, with one high-growth market, innovation, and high-performance specialty materials.

Medical packaging, water purification, isolation construction materials, and high-performance parts, coating, and lubricants are all benefiting from a strong underlying growth trend, including population aging, climate change, population growth, energy saving green agenda (isolation of building, electrification), aerospace market expansion, etc.

So while legacy issues with PFAS pollution might have an impact on the company’s results in the short term, the long-term perspectives are likely solid, with no legacy segment dragging down the performance of the more dynamic parts of the company.

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