BASF's Supply Chain: From Oil Feedstock to Car Parts and Crops

BASF is the world's largest chemical company, and almost nothing it makes is a finished product a consumer buys directly. Here's who buys its chemicals, and what raw materials feed its plants.

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Aug 9, 2026 · 2 min read

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BASF makes more chemicals than any other company on earth, and almost none of it ends up in a product with the BASF name on it. Its plastics, coatings, and crop chemicals disappear into other companies' products: a car's dashboard, a field of crops, a coat of paint. Its business is built around giant integrated production sites, and a short list of raw-material suppliers keeps them running.

The short answer

BASF's supply chain runs from oil and gas to finished consumer products:

• Who buys it: Volkswagen Group and Samvardhana Motherson buy engineering plastics and coatings for vehicles; farmers worldwide buy its crop-protection chemicals.
• What feeds its plants: Shell supplies the naphtha and petrochemical feedstocks that start the chemical chain; Linde supplies the industrial gases used throughout processing.
• How the plants get built: specialized process-plant and engineering firms design and construct BASF's reactors and integrated production sites.

The full interactive map is on BASF's supply chain page.

Who buys BASF's chemicals

Volkswagen Group buys engineering plastics, coatings, and battery materials that go into its vehicles, and Samvardhana Motherson, a major auto-parts maker, buys engineering polymers for mirrors and interior modules. BASF's name appears on neither company's finished product. That's normal for a chemicals supplier, whose value shows up in someone else's part number. On the agricultural side, farmers worldwide are the end buyers of BASF's crop-protection chemicals and seeds, a business line that runs almost entirely separate from its industrial chemicals.

What BASF's plants run on

Chemical manufacturing starts with feedstock, and BASF doesn't drill for its own oil or gas. Shell supplies the naphtha and other petrochemical feedstocks that begin the chemical chain at BASF's production sites. Linde supplies industrial gases such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which are used at almost every stage of chemical processing.

BASF's production model is built around what it calls "Verbund" sites, giant integrated complexes where one plant's byproduct becomes another plant's raw material. Specialized process-plant and engineering firms design and build the reactors and production units that these sites run on.

See it for yourself

The full tier-by-tier breakdown, with live tickers for every company involved, is on BASF's supply chain map.