“Innovation has always been part of BASF’s DNA. Especially in these volatile times, it is crucial to leverage our innovative strength to develop competitive solutions that differentiate us as a company in our markets and give us a competitive edge,” said Dr. Stephan Kothrade, Member of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF and Chief Technology Officer, at the company’s Research Press Briefing held today. To achieve this, BASF implemented its “Winning Ways” strategy about a year ago with the clear goal of becoming the preferred chemical company to enable its customers’ green transformation. “Our ambition extends beyond making BASF green. We aim to inspire customers to choose BASF as their trusted partner for their future success,” Kothrade said.
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The first jacket made of loopamid® in front of the loopamid plant in Shanghai, China. |
Research and development (R&D) is a vital pillar in this strategy, as BASF’s products and process innovations enable customers to innovate and grow in their respective markets and significantly contribute to achieving profitable growth and value creation in a world moving towards greater sustainability. For BASF, the green transformation, sustainable agriculture and competitiveness are the most important topics where progress in R&D is essential. This also includes continuous improvement of technologies, processes and operations, which has always been a priority for BASF. “Through continuous improvements in the energy and resource efficiency of our plants, we not only secure cost leadership in many value chains but also make our products more sustainable,” Kothrade said.
To further strengthen its R&D portfolio, BASF is continuously researching new solutions and enhancing existing products and processes by leveraging its innovative power. With annual investments in R&D of around €2 billion in 2024, BASF is the leading company in the chemical industry. Around 80 percent of R&D activities in scope are directly related to BASF’s sustainability targets. “That shows our strong commitment to the green transformation,” Kothrade said. Investment in R&D also pays off: Over 15 percent of BASF’s sales – around €11 billion in 2024 – were generated by innovative products launched in the past five years that stemmed from R&D activities. “The most important factors in our success are the know-how and the commitment of our approximately 10,000 R&D employees globally,” said Kothrade. In 2024, their work and expertise resulted in over 1,000 new patents worldwide, with about 45 percent focusing on sustainability and 23 percent on digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI).
Dr. Christoph Wegner, President Group Research, underlined the significance of digitalization in BASF’s R&D activities: “Digital solutions and artificial intelligence are indispensable in today’s R&D work.” BASF’s knowledge management platform QKnows enables the global R&D community to search scientific literature, patents and internal reports all in one place. AI capabilities make finding relevant information in the more than 400 million documents much quicker, thus helping researchers to explore complex scientific topics and gain valuable insights for their work. “You will hardly find such a powerful system elsewhere. This clearly gives us a competitive advantage,” Wegner pointed out.
Another example of digitalization in R&D at BASF is the company’s first AI reactor. Maximizing the yield of a reaction is one of the typical and sophisticated tasks of a chemist. The common practice has been to vary different reaction parameters one after the other, which can be a very time-consuming process until yields reach a satisfying level. The AI reactor now significantly accelerates this complex process. It plans, executes and analyzes chemical experiments. And more importantly, the reactor learns and autonomously triggers the next reaction cycle and maximizes the yield of the reaction. “Our first experiments already demonstrated that we are 20 times faster than when we do it manually,” Wegner said. BASF therefore plans to expand this system to cover all chemistry relevant to the company.
The third example for AI use in BASF’s R&D comes from the Agricultural Solutions division. Groundwater leaching assessment is a critical step for the registration of plant protection products. This process is complex, time-consuming and requires deep regulatory expertise. Given current regulatory models, it is impractical to conduct assessments for the high number of candidates involved in early research phases. Here, an AI-supported tool has been developed which predicts groundwater leaching risk for all compounds involved early in the research process. To develop the underlying model for that prediction, BASF ran about one million simulations on its supercomputer Quriosity. “Artificial intelligence helps us to focus our resources on the safest compounds with the highest chance of success,” said Wegner, summarizing the advantages.
At the Research Press Briefing, BASF experts presented concrete innovations to illustrate how the focus on green transformation, sustainable agriculture and competitiveness looks in practice.
