BASF’s businesses are now grouped into two parts; core and standalone. Core includes i) Chemicals ii) Materials iii) Industrial Solutions iv) Nutrition & Care. Standalone has i) Surface Technologies ii) Agricultural Solutions. Note – Nutrition and Care is where the surfactants (most of them) are. In terms of Sales / EBITDA / EBITDA Margin % for each, the scorecard ( € Billions) is Core: 40.5 / 4.6 / 11% and Standalone: 25.2 / 3.5 / 14%

China’s a big deal for BASF’s future. They putting € 10 Billion into the Zhanjiang verbund site. It is expected to generate € 4 – 5 Billion in sales and € 1 – 1.2 Billion in EBITDA by 2030. That’s a far higher margin than the company historically has done and around a quarter of the EBITDA generated today by that Core group. The China project is key for surfactants with EO and a range of nonionics up to 215,000 tonnes of capacity (just for nonionics).

..more high profile concerns about EUDR within the EU itself. None other than German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to postpone new EU rules. Scholz told a conference on Thursday in Berlin that he had discussed the EU Deforestation Regulation with European Commission President von der Leyen and “advocated … that the regulation be suspended until the open questions raised by the BDZV [German digital and newspapers publishers association] have been clarified.” In March, the publishers’ lobby wrote to the German government and the Commission criticizing “impractical requirements” and a “drastic bureaucratic burden on companies.” It asked the Commission to “mitigate the risks, sanctions and burdens” created by the new law, which is set to apply from Dec. 30. Now, I’m not sure how or why this publisher’s group got involved. Is this the press somehow doing its job under a united front (not sure I like that, by the way) or is there some enlightened self-interest. Can someone opine?