In the Footsteps of Farben

When mighty I. G. Farben was broken up by the Allies after World War II, the smallest and least known of the three major offshoots was a company called Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik. Like the two others, Bayer and Hoechst, B.A.S.F. proved to be a true heir to the vaunted Farben inventiveness and enterprise. It quickly rebuilt its bombed-out plants along the Rhine at Ludwigshafen, then spread out over 1,580 acres to develop Europe's largest single chemical complex. Now Europe's leading producer of raw materials for plastics and synthetic fibers, B.A.S.F. increased its sales by 18% to $940 million in 1964, a performance that makes it one of the world's fastest growing chemical companies.

Room to Graze. B.A.S.F. has already outgrown Ludwigshafen, and its reach now extends far beyond the Rhine; 45% of sales, in fact, come from exports and foreign production. To expand foreign operations even more, B.A.S.F. has joined with Shell to build a fertilizer plant in Utrecht and an ammonia plant near Rotterdam, plans a $17.5 million polyethylene plant near Marseille. Last year it bought land in Antwerp for a $50 million factory that will produce fertilizer and synthetic fibers, and moved into Mexico by acquiring a local chemical firm. In the U.S., the company's biggest foreign customer, B.A.S.F. is a joint owner (with Dow Chemical) of a plant in Texas, last year bought plants in Massachusetts and New Jersey. "When Americans graze in our pastures," says President Carl Wurster, "why shouldn't we also graze in theirs?"

B.A.S.F. started a century ago as a manufacturer of dyestuffs, went on to develop revolutionary new processes for making sulphuric acid and liquefying chlorine; 85% of the world's nitrogen is made by a process that came out of B.A.S.F. laboratories. In the 1930s, after it had been absorbed by I. G. Farben, the company produced many new plastics and the first magnetic recording tape. To this day, magnetic tape is its only consumer product; everything else is sold as a raw material or for industrial use.

Happy Problem. A research chemist with an accountant's nose for profits, President Wurster, 64, rose to the top of B.A.S.F. before the war and stayed on as president when the company was split off from Farben. He still finds time to lecture in chemistry at Heidelberg, read the classics in Latin and Greek. Happily, his biggest problem now is that orders are coming in faster than the company can fill them. To meet the mounting backlog, B.A.S.F. has allocated $500 million for expansion at home and abroad over four years. This year it will spend $200 million on plant and equipment-- more than any other German chemical company.

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