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. It runs on a business model built around giant integrated production sites, and it depends on a short list of raw-material suppliers to keep 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. Neither company's finished product visibly contains BASF's name, which is typical of how a chemicals supplier operates: the value shows up in someone else's part number. On the agricultural side, are the end buyers of BASF's crop-protection chemicals and seeds, a business line that runs almost entirely separate from its industrial chemicals.