Bayer Bounces Back

To most Americans, the word Bayer means headach pills. Aspirin was indeed invented by Germany's Bayer Farbenfabriken, but one of the company's major migraines is that its aspirin is made in the U.S. solely by Manhattan's Sterling Drug Co. Bayer (pronounced buyer) lost its U.S. trademarks during World War I and has been unable to get them back.

Despite Germany's wars, depressions and inflations, Bayer has always recovered by creating new products-- from the world's first sulfa drugs and synthetic rubber to Europe's first color film, put out by its Agfa subsidiary. Now Bayer has regained its postwar position as the continent's biggest chemical industry. Bayer earned $50 million on last year's sales of $1 billion and recently announced that sales are running 9.5% ahead so far in 1963.

The $25 million aht Bayer invests annually in research has produced so many postwar products that 58% of its sales come from items that did not exist 15 years ago. President Kurt Hansen, 53, is a relaxed, personable sort who recalls, "A journalist once asked me why we didn't invite the press when we developed a new product. So I replied, 'Do you want to be invited every day?' " Pharmacy of the World. Since its founding 100 years ago by Dyemaker Friedrich Bayer, the company has shown a knack for seeing ahead of competitors. In the 1860s Bayer began setting up aniline plants from Albany, N.Y., to Moscow. Friedrich Bayer's successor, Chemist Carl Duisberg, transformed the company's dismal laboratories from mud-floored hovels into bright, superbly equipped plants. These became the models for modern labs elsewhere and the source of a grand succession of inventions--mediicnes to fight sleeping sickness and tuberculosis --that made Germany the pharmacy of the world. Duisberg was also a prime mover in organizing the I. G. Farben chemical cartel, which played a key role in Hitler's war.

After V-E day, the Allies dismembered Farben, splitting off the large Hoechst and B.A.S.F. branches and leaving Bayer with only its badly damaged plant at Leverkusen and 3,000 employees. Came the cold war and Bayer in 1952 was permitted to repossess most of its prewar plants and resume full speed. Bayer's Rhineside headquarters at Leverjusen now embrace 600 buildings, including a 33-story skyscraper that is Germany's tallest. Looking Outward. A concentration on foreign markets has helped put Bayer ahead of its German competitors. Nearly half its sales are exports, and it has interests in 132 foreign companies.

Bayer's foreign emphasis was underlined by the promotion of Kurt Hansen to chairman in 1961. Though his cheeks are scarred like a Prussian's from university dueling matches, Hansen belongs to the rising generation of worldly and multilingual German managers. A chemist who also studied business ad ministration, Hansen feels at ease in New York (where he established Bayer's postwar relations with U.S. companies) or India (where he was called in recently to advise the government on setting up a chemical industry). He works in a Spartan office in Leverkusen, but drives home three miles each noon for lunch with his pretty wife.

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