FMC, with headquarters in Center City, announced Brondeau's hiring today.
Brondeau, 52, will join the FMC board and begin his new position at FMC on Jan. 1.
Brondeau said in a phone interview that he had several job offers and chose FMC because the company had a "great portfolio" of businesses. "It's not a turn-around situation at all," he said.
Brondeau announced he would retire from Rohm & Haas in July as Dow began eliminating employees in the Philadelphia headquarters and consolidating operations with those of Dow, which is based in Midland, Mich.
Brondeau said that it was "very hard for me to see so many employees leaving" Rohm & Haas. He said he retired because he wanted to run a publicly traded corporation.
FMC, which is on the 1700 block of Market Street, manufactures industrial and agricultural chemicals. It reported third-quarter revenues of $713.3 million and profits of $28 million.
FMC spokesman Jim Fitzwater said Brondeau was considered an "exceptional talent among peers" by the FMC board of directors, which began seeking a new top executive earlier this year.
Current FMC chief executive William G. Walter, 64, is approaching mandatory retirement and will remain as chairman of the FMC board through October, the company said.
Brondeau was expected to lead a Dow division in Philadelphia after Dow purchased Rohm & Haas in an all-debt, $15.7 billion deal.
But the once-friendly merger between Dow and Rohm & Haas devolved into rancor in the global economic collapse in late 2008. Dow's good deal in July 2008 looked like disaster by December.
Dow asked to delay the multibillion-dollar merger because of the bad economy and because a deal with the Kuwait government to form a joint venture fell apart. That deal would have raised $7 billion to $9 billion cash for the Rohm acquisition.
Rohm & Haas refused and sued in Delaware to force Dow Chemical to honor the merger contract. The two companies spent millions of dollars on lawyers and sparred publicly as they prepared for a March trial.
Dow Chemical warned that if it bought Rohm & Haas at the original terms it would almost immediately default on the terms of its bank covenants and the banks could take control of the giant chemical company.
In last-minute negotiations leading up to the trial in southern Delaware, Dow Chemical agreed to purchase Rohm & Haas on the original terms. To help the beleaguered chemical giant, Philadelphia's Haas family and a Wall Street hedge-fund operator loaned Dow Chemical $3 billion. Dow gained possession of Rohm & Haas on April 1.
Dow said the huge debt for buying Rohm & Haas would lead to deep employee cutbacks and began laying off Rohm & Haas employees at the headquarters in July.
Raj Gupta, who engineered the sale of Rohm & Haas to Dow, had said he would retire when the deal closed, leaving the top Philadelphia position open for Brondeau.
But Brondeau announced his retirement in late July and he was replaced by 30-year Dow executive Jerome Peribere, 55. Peribere managed Dow's Indianapolis-based agricultural business.
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