As the world’s leading chemical company we play a decisive role in shaping the future. We base our actions on sustainability. Our strategic goal is to permanently grow profitably. We achieve this through operational excellence, innovations and investments in growth markets. As a reliable partner, we help our customers to be more successful with our products and intelligent solutions.
In 2007, the rapid integration of the large acquisitions made in 2006 offered BASF more competitive advantages and greater cyclical resilience. We have further improved our portfolio through acquisitions and divestitures and further interlocked our business to the value adding chain of our customers. As a result, we recorded significantly higher growth than the market and further increased our earnings. In order to improve our market position, we will continue to focus on innovative business areas and further optimize our portfolio in the future.
Further improving operational excellence
We are continually optimizing our sites, plants and processes in order to further improve operationally. We are continuing with the implementation of our restructuring and cost reduction measures. Operative excellence remains a focus of ours. The worldwide BASF Verbund and our highly integrated processes are key to being competitive in all regions.
New market opportunities through innovations
As a research-based chemical company we consider innovation as key to profitable growth. This is why we systematically expand our research and development activities. In 2007, we again increased spending in research and development by 8%. A global network enables interdisciplinary cooperation with our partners from industry as well as our customers from diverse industries. We focus on market-driven innovations, new business models and future fields of knowledge. We have combined the important technology-driven issues of the future in five separate growth clusters:
- Energy management
- Raw material change
- Nanotechnology
- Plant biotechnology
- White (industrial) biotechnology
All employees in our global BASF team contribute to developing the market successes of tomorrow from new ideas with creativity and entrepreneurship.
Strong partnerships enable us to develop significant growth markets. In Monsanto we found an excellent partner for research, development and commercialization in plant biotechnology. In the oil and gas business, our stake in natural gas production has furthered our long-term collaboration with Gazprom.
