BASF

BASF (acronym for Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik, in Spanish: Badense factory of sodium bicarbonate and aniline) is a chemical company. It was founded in mid-1865 in the city of Ludwigshafen, Rhineland-Palatinate, by Friedrich Engelhorn for the purpose of producing dyes. It is the world's largest chemical company, surpassing the Dow Chemical Company and DuPont, as well as the first with the most sales revenue in 2008.

Its main factory, still based in the company's hometown (Ludwigshafen), has become the world's largest integrated chemical facility, with an area of 10 square kilometres. The production center has two thousand buildings, 115 kilometers of streets and approximately 211 kilometers of train tracks, where more than 39,000 employees work.

Counting worldwide, there are 109,140 employees on five continents. In its business segments, BASF announced sales of €63,873 million in 2010.

History

Former headquarters of BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein.

Between 1925 and 1951 he was part of the IG Farben conglomerate. After World War II it was dissolved by the Allies because it used slave labor in its manufacturing processes. Due to the severity of the war crimes committed by IG Farben during World War II, the Allies considered the company too corrupt to allow it to continue to exist, and during the Nuremberg Trials they ordered the consortium dismembered. The Western Allies in 1951, divided the company into its original constituent companies. The largest four, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and Agfa, quickly bought out the smallest. Of the 24 IG Farben executives indicted in the so-called IG Farben Trial (1947-1948) before a US military tribunal at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 13 were sentenced to between one and eight years in prison. Some of those defendants in the trial became leaders of the postwar companies that were formed when IG Farben spun off, including those who were sentenced at Nuremberg. IG Farben's successor companies inherited all of IG Farben's properties, but not the criminal liabilities.