The chemical companies including petrochemical and polymer companies have shown a healthy growth in 2005 globally.
BASF, with annual sale over US$50 billion continues to retain its premier position as the largest company in the World as it has been for last several years or decades. It showed operating profit of almost US$7 billion and net profit of US$3.5 billion.
The List of top ten companies comprises of five European companies, three American and one each from China and Saudi Arabia.
Besides BASF, Bayer, Inoes, Shell and Total are the European companies. Three American companies are Dow, Dupont and ExxonMobil. The minimum sales of Sabic, the tenth largest company is almost US$21 billion. Massive expansion projects by Sabic are expected to catapult the company to the list of the top five companies by 2010. Sinopec, the largest Chinese company with annual sale of US$22 billion, holds the ninth position globally. Interestingly, eight out of ten top chemical companies are involved in polymer business. However, only seven companies have a larger share of polymer business in their portfolio.
Dow Chemical is the second company by sale but has the highest assets, primarily due to its involvement in feedstock. Compared to BASF, Dow has more assets due to capital intensive feedstock plants. With a sale of over US$625000 per person in 2005, the productivity of person is the highest in case of BASF.
Bayer, because of its focus on life sciences, has higher assets and is ranked the third highest by asset value. Bayer has almost 100000 people working for it and is the largest company by number of employees. BASF had the highest capital expenditure of about US$2.5 billion. Bayer that heavily concentrates on life sciences, had the highest R&D expenditure in 2005, spending almost 7% of its sales revenue on R& D.
However, the highest amount spent on R&D compared to sales was seen with Merck Kgaa. It spent 12 % of its sale on R&D in 2005.
Shell has the lowest number of people - 8500.
Sabic although is positioned as tenth company in terms of sales, scores well in terms of both operating as well as net profit- topping the chart among all the 100 companies.
Degussa, ranked 14 th by sales is the worst performer in terms of net profit. It has a loss of more than US$500 million. Ciba, involved in polymer additives showed a negative operating profit of around US$ 100 million and net loss of about US$200 million. This clearly indicates that polymer additives did not perform well in 2005 perhaps due to stiff competition from Chinese and other Asian producers.
NPC of Iran had spent the highest amount on capital expenditure compared to its sale because it is in the phase of setting up new petrochemical projects & is relatively a new entrant.