BASF Going Bankrupt?

Please note that this blog entry was written near the end of the summer of 2024.  I do not believe the situation with German industry has changed at all since then.  Our current company is finally expanding its warehouse space and obtaining new office space before we build out a new lab.  We will be updating the other company website soon to reflect these changes.


Over the years I have had numerous dealings with this company and it has been a real mixed bag.  Early on (ca. 2004) I met with the head of the Polyisobutylene Products for North America, Timea Marsalko.  She was a very nice person, quite possibly the best that I have dealt with from this company in terms of the way she treated people.  Not long after, BASF sent me several samples of ionic liquids.  Things then went downhill from there.  After sending their research group in Germany a sample of 1,2-C6F4[B(C6F5)2)]2 for them to study in the polymerization of isobutylene I was blown away by two things.  One was their inability to read and comprehend my simple instructions which called for handling this compound under an inert atmosphere.  I soon found out, as unbelievable as it is, that this division of BASF didn’t even have a glove box!  A multibillion dollar company didn’t even have a glove box for this part of their R&D.  That is kind of like saying that one of the big auto companies didn’t have a ratcheting socket wrench.  Instead, their experiment using several hundreds of dollars of material that I not only provided for free but paid to ship to Germany and paid the associated duty fees was to open a reactor and dump the entire contents into a charge of isobutylene under air!  Not only that but they were unable to provide me any polymerization data with the exception that they said it was highly active for polymerization.

At this stage I realized that even though BASF was the largest chemical company in the world that they must have also been the most inept and retarded and quickly made the decision to not pursue any collaboration with them.  Several years passed and a “scientist” of theirs called me out of the blue inquiring as to how I was able to conduct cationic polymerizations in water.  I didn’t give this (and the reader will understand my use of quotations) “scientist” any real information because as I have learned with Germans such as Ingo Kro**ing that the German people want to pick your brain for free and not even offer to put your name in the acknowledgements section of a paper let alone place you as an inventor on any resultant patents, pay you a royalty, or even (heaven forbid) place you as a coauthor on any publications for chemistry you might have invented.  Subsequently, I contacted this BASF “scientist” some years later when I discovered that research funded by BASF was most likely fabricated.  This “scientist” had the audacity to tell me, “so what?”  Of course I later found out part of the reason for not being concerned about misusing BASF’s money is that he is acknowledged in the paper containing fabricated research!

So fast forward to today and I had attempted numerous times (last attempt was on 6-5-24) to get a few samples of ionic liquids so that I can test some chemistry and see if scale up to pilot plant level is worth doing.  BASF (in the US) told me that they are no longer manufacturing these materials!!!  I use three exclamation points seeing that BASF was one of the main producers of such materials.  What this tells me is that this company is on the way to bankruptcy.  What led to this?  I believe that poor leadership under the helm of their current CEO is the main causal factor (please note this was written in July of 2024).  This company is so poorly run that many of the links in their website to contact certain groups simply do not work.  For example, when I tried contacting the German section that handled these compounds (i.e., ionic liquids), despite there being a request form on their website you will not receive any response from them.  I even sent a copy of my request to the email address listed for this group and there was no response.  Even the investor’s relations will not return any correspondence about any of the aforementioned dealings I have had with BASF.  I don’t know about you, but I sure would not invest in a company like this.  But I am not surprised as there is no easy means of finding out how to send correspondence to their CEO.  My conclusion is poor leadership, lack of accountability, and the destruction of their cheap gas feedstocks will ultimately lead to the destruction of this company and many others in Germany.

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