Herbert Dow invented a more efficient process to separate bromine and sold it to other firms, which made it into sedatives and photographic supplies. Dow and other Americans sold bromine inside the U. S. for 36 cents.
Internationally, a powerful German cartel, Die Deutsche Bromkonvention, had been the dominant supplier of bromine since it first was mass-marketed in the mid-1800s. This cartel fixed the world price for bromine at a lucrative 49 cents a pound. Customers either paid the 49 cents or they went without. The Bromkonvention made it clear that if the Americans tried to sell elsewhere, the Germans would flood the American market with cheap bromine and drive them out of business.
By 1904, Dow was ready to break the unwritten rules and decided to sell in Europe. He easily beat the cartel’s 49 cent price and sold America’s first bromine in England. Before long, the Bromkonvention poured bromine into America at 15 cents a pound, well below its fixed price of 49 cents, and also below Dow’s 36 cent price.
Dow worked out a daring strategy. He had his agent in New York discreetly buy hundreds of thousands of pounds of German bromine at the cartel’s 15 cent price. Then Dow repackaged the German product and sold it in Europe—including Germany!—at 27 cents a pound. "When this 15-cent price was made over here," Dow said, "instead of meeting it, we pulled out of the American market altogether and used all our production to supply the foreign demand. This, as we afterward learned, was not what they anticipated we would do."
