Organization of the BASF Group

The BASF Group’s business is run by 11 divisions, structured in six segments:

• Chemicals: Petrochemicals, Intermediates
• Materials: Performance Materials, Monomers
• Industrial Solutions: Dispersions & Resins, Performance Chemicals
• Surface Technologies: Catalysts, Coatings
• Nutrition & Care: Care Chemicals, Nutrition & Health
• Agricultural Solutions: Agricultural Solutions

This segment structure enables us to steer our businesses in a differentiated way according to market-specific requirements and the competitive environment. We provide a high level of transparency around the results of our segments and show the importance of the Verbund and value chains to our business success. The operating divisions, the service units, the regions and the corporate center are the cornerstones of the BASF organization. This organizational structure lays the foundation for customer proximity, competitiveness and profitable growth. BASF aims to differentiate its businesses from their competitors and establish a high-performance organization to enable BASF to be successful in an increasingly competitive market environment.

For more information on the products and services offered by the segments, see:

• Chemicals
• Materials
• Industrial Solutions
• Surface Technologies
• Nutrition & Care
• Agricultural Solutions
• For more information on the segment structure, see Note 5 to the Consolidated Financial Statements

The divisions bear strategic and operational responsibility and are organized according to sectors or products. They manage the 52 global and regional business units and develop strategies for 72 strategic business units.

BASF’s regional and national companies represent the Group locally and support the growth of business units with local proximity to customers. For financial reporting purposes, we organize the regional companies into four regions: Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, as well as South America, Africa and Middle East.

To strengthen our innovation capabilities, we reorganized our global research activities in 2022 and aligned them even more closely with the needs of our customers. As part of this, we integrated downstream research into the divisions and bundled activities with broad relevance for our customers in a research division. This division is globally positioned with research centers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

• More information on the reorganization of our research activities

Five service units provide competitive services for the operating divisions and sites: Global Engineering Services, Global Digital Services, Global Procurement, European Site & Verbund Management and Global Business Services (finance, human resources, environmental protection, health, safety and quality, intellectual property, communications, procurement, supply chain and in-house consulting services).

We have driven forward the bundling of services and resources in the Global Business Services unit, making greater use of the digi­talization of processes. This aims to achieve annual savings of more than €200 million from 2023.¹

The Corporate Center supports the Board of Executive Directors in steering the company as a whole. These include central tasks from the following areas: strategy, finance and controlling, compliance and law, tax, environmental protection, health, safety and quality, human resources, communications, investor relations, corporate audit and the Net Zero Accelerator unit.

Corporate legal structure

As the publicly listed parent company of the BASF Group, BASF SE takes a central position: Directly or indirectly, it holds the shares in the companies belonging to the BASF Group, and is also one of the largest operating companies. In the BASF Group Consolidated Financial Statements, 248 companies including BASF SE are fully consolidated. We consolidate nine joint operations on a proportional basis and account for 23 companies using the equity method.

• For more information, see Note 2 to the Consolidated Financial Statements