China holds a strong position in the global chemical industry and with the recent market happenings in the country; the Asian country is keen on upgrading its game plan.

BASF announced today that it has signed a purchase agreement to acquire the styrene catalysts business of CRI/Criterion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell based in Houston, Texas. Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Anyone planning investment projects in China must follow the clearly-specified rules of the game, otherwise he is pre-programmed to fail. Without support from Chinese Design Institutes, nothing gets off the ground at all in China. The reason for this was illuminated at a DECHEMA information day.

The leading chemical companies in the world come from Germany and the US: BASF with a turnover of 73.5 billion euros in 2011 was well ahead of US-based Dow Chemical which had a turnover of 46.28 billion euros. Nevertheless, BASF only came 71st in Fortune magazine’s rankings of the world's major corporations. Currently, no company from the emerging economies of India, China or Brazil made it intoi the Top-10---

The Supervisory Board of BASF SE has appointed Sanjeev Gandhi to the Board of Executive Directors effective December 1, 2014. He has been head of BASF’s Intermediates division since 2010

Under the terms of the contract, Toyo will be responsible for carrying out engineering work for BASF’s investments in Asia Pacific. The renewed agreement can be traced back to the original partnership agreement which aimed at strengthening the partnership for BASF’s upcoming investments.

BASF has expanded the production of polyacrylamide powder at its site in Nanjing, China and with this move, the firm aims to produce additional 20,000 metric tonnes per year capacity of polyacrylamide in order to support mining customers in the Asia Pacific region.

Powerful, intuitively operated documentation tool proves its usefulness in practice — Documenting the actual as-built status of a large process plant is a Herculean task. It is not unusual for the change to the plant itself to take less time than the subsequent changes in the documentation. With myriads of copies and handwritten notes, important information is easily ge lost. For all these reasons, BASF in Ludwigshafen decided on the successive installation of an electronic documentation system — and the results speak for themselves …

American engineering specialists CB&I will work on the expansion of BASF's process plant in Antwerp, Belgium: The company announced today that it has been awarded a contract for the engineering, procurement and construction management for a new butadiene extraction plant at the site.

BASF published an update on the the fire at the North Harbor in Ludwigshafen. Two employees of the company's fire department and an employee of a tanker which was anchored in the harbor died in the accident.