Dow Chief Is Right at Home in Eastern Europe : Chemicals: Born in Bulgaria, Frank Popoff is guiding the expansion of the company’s global operations.

Born in Bulgaria and raised in the Midwest, Frank P. Popoff feels at home steering Dow Chemical Co. into Eastern Europe.

Popoff is a veteran of the chemical business in Dow’s European operations and travels there at least once a year. The president and chief executive is at home in a changing Eastern Europe and its fledgling free-market economy.

“But because we’re old hands in that part of the world and have been for many, many years, we’re trying to be part of a process, rather than part of the pyrotechnics of Eastern Europe newly discovered by people who, a year ago, couldn’t have cared less,” he said.

High-profile U.S. companies have plunged into Eastern Europe over the past year, forming businesses ranging from auto assembly plants to tourist hotels. But Dow has been there since the 1960s, originally as a trader with all the East Bloc countries and more recently as a partner in a Hungarian Styrofoam factory.

Global operations are part of a broader strategy that Popoff helped devise to tame boom-and-bust cycles in the chemical industry. He has also pushed Dow into new technologies, pharmaceuticals and consumer products ranging from oven cleaner to Saran Wrap, which sell regardless of the economy’s health.

He said the biggest challenge is trying to persuade consumers that Dow’s products can be used without harming the environment.

“There are no chlorofluorocarbons in these cups anymore,” Popoff said in an interview, picking up a white foam coffee cup.

“We have to be a player in the Earth Day scenario,” he said. “We’ll either have to meet this challenge or revise our growth rates for the industry.”

A 50% slump in second-quarter earnings proved that the country’s second-largest chemical company behind Dupont isn’t yet immune to industry cycles.

Prices for plastics and chemical products weakened, raw material costs stayed high, and production outages at several plants contributed to the decline.

Popoff and other Dow officials predict that a gradually improving economy still will give Dow its best year in sales and third-best year in profits.

“Dow is like a baseball player who hits .300 year in and year out,” said David Sowerby, vice president and economist at Manufacturers National Bank in Detroit.

Of the second-quarter earnings, he said: “Even .300 hitters go into temporary slumps. The economy is weak and they can’t escape that. They still look good fundamentally.”

Although developments in Europe are of particular interest to Popoff, he said the area remains mired in bureaucracy and central planning that make it relatively unattractive to foreign investors.

“The Pacific Rim is, I think, the growth area for the next decade,” Popoff said. Dow has expanding operations in Japan, Thailand, Korea and China.

Popoff, 54, succeeded Vienna-born Paul F. Oreffice as president and chief executive in 1987 after success with European operations. Oreffice remains chairman.

“He did a good job of achieving a low-cost production position in Europe, and that’s why they brought him over here,” said industry analyst Fred H. Siemer of Chemical Research for Wall Street. “He understands the global nature of the business.”

The global outlook came to Popoff naturally. His family left Bulgaria when he was a child, amid the turmoil of Hitler’s Nazi expansion. His father ran an import-export business.

The Popoffs emigrated to Terre Haute, Ind., in 1940. Popoff’s father operated a dry-cleaning business, Popoff attended high school, and the family became U.S. citizens.

Popoff graduated in 1959 from Indiana University in Bloomington with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in business administration. He returns for alumni activities and advisory committee meetings and is an active alumnus of Sigma Chi, his college fraternity.

“Frank is a very valued counselor for me,” said Jack Wentworth, dean of the university’s School of Business. Dow hires many university graduates and funds scholarships at the school.

Wentworth said Popoff also relishes meeting old friends like John Peterson, now chairman of City Securities Corp. in Indianapolis. “When they get together they act like classmates and they go back to their old local pub.”

“We’ll go back to Nick’s Old English Pub for old memories,” Peterson said. “They don’t check us for IDs anymore, they just look at us funny because we have a tie. The students are looking very young.”

Popoff strikes many as urbane and humble at the same time, perhaps a reflection of his success.

“He’s not phony,” Wentworth said. “He doesn’t come on like he knows it all. He’s the kind of person you’d like if he was the janitor.”