BASF opens Shanghai automotive center

BASF has revved up its operations in Asia by establishing an automotive center in Shanghai. The 5-story building houses an automotive showroom, application development laboratories, technical service facilities, and marketing, sales, and supply chain operations for BASF’s catalysts and engineering plastics business units. “Automotive constitutes one of BASF’s most important target industry segments and our second-largest revenue source,” explained Wolfgang Hapke, BASF’s Asia Pacific President. “In 2006, BASF derived some 10% of its total sales of €52.6 billion from the automotive industry.”

On the latest trends in the automotive industry, Hapke said that Asia’s automotive industry is turning in the highest growth rates in the world at 8% per annum, with China being one of the main growth drivers. Presenting BASF’s approach to this sector, he cited many examples of innovative technologies that the company has developed in response to new trends and demands posed by the industry.

For example, different business units in BASF have pooled their expertise to develop a car seat that can almost completely be made of BASF products: from the seat shells made of engineering plastics that are light in weight and low in cost and polyurethane foams that improve sitting comfort; to upholstery made more durable from special leather and textile finishing chemicals and superabsorbers. BASF is offering this complete solution to vehicle manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers.

Under the hood, there is an entire plastics world that BASF caters to—temperature-resistant plastics function right next to the engine block. Cable sheathing, insulating materials, gaskets as well as other various aggregates ranging from the fuel pump to the air-intake manifold—are all “made of plastics.”—[email protected]