Chemical industry giant BASF turns 150

There's no corporation in the chemical industry that has bigger revenues or a larger market cap than BASF. Sales in 2014 amounted to a hefty 74.3 billion euros ($79.9 billion). The company has 113,000 employees in more than 80 countries. The corporate HQ is in western Germany at Ludwigshafen am Rhein (pictured). BASF has more than 390 production sites around the world.

BASF was founded on April 6, 1865, by Friedrich Engelhorn, under the name of Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (later BASF). Engelhorn had already been running a factory for several years that supplied the city of Mannheim with gas for its street lamps. A byproduct was coal tar. Engelhorn decided to found BASF to produce tar-based and aniline dyes for the textile industry.

Since the turn of the 20th century, thanks to R&D by German chemists Fritz Haber und Carl Bosch, it has been possible to produce ammonia on an industrial scale. That's a key ingredient for both fertilizer and explosives. During the first world war, BASF produced explosives, gunpowder, and poison gas for the German military.

The European economy pace of recovery after the first world war was rather slow. The German chemical industry's main firms had already collaborated loosely since 1916, in support of the German war effort. In 1925, BASF fused with five other firms, including Hoechst and Bayer, to form I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (I.G. Farben). Pictured: I.G. Farben's then-HQ in Frankfurt (Main).

I.G. Farben collaborated with the Nazi regime. The company made extensive use of forced labor, including concentration camp prisoners. Pictured: The I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz-Monowitz, where Zyklon B poison gas was produced. The gas was originally meant to serve as an insecticide, but the Nazis ended up using it in the death camps to murder millions of human beings.

Allied troops occupied I.G. Farben's Ludwighafen factory in March 1945. It had already been largely destroyed by aerial bombing. In the same year, the four occupying powers confiscated the company's entire capital stock. In the Soviet occupation zone, the company's factories were dismantled and shipped East, or nationalized. In November 1945, the Allied control council dissolved I.G. Farben.

On January 30, 1952, eleven companies were created out of the ruined legacy of I.G. Farben, among them several future major-league players: Agfa, Bayer AG, Hoechst AG, and BASF. Initially, BASF focused mostly on making plastics. Over the decades that followed, BASF broadened its product range and built more and more production facilities around the world. It became a global company.

BASF's product range is huge: Paints and varnishes, styrofoam, insulation materials, medicines, light stabilizers, vehicle battery materials, adhesives and more. The company invests heavily in research - for example in organic solar cells (pictured). The company's 2014 research budget was around 1.8 billion euros.

A large fraction of BASF's sales consist of chemicals and production materials for other industries, including construction, pharmaceutical, textile, and automobile industries. BASF materials used in the renovation of London's Underground (pictured), for example, include tunnel boring machines, robotic machines for rock-wall support construction, spray concrete and fire protection coatings.

Public awareness of BASF's wide range of businesses is limited. Few people know, for example, that BASF is not only the world's biggest chemical industry company, but also one of Germany's biggest wine sellers. The company sold about 900,000 bottles in 2013 alone. The cellars of the wine sales subsidiary, more than 100 years old, feature more than 2,000 different wines.