Three projects receive BASF Awards 2007

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Outstanding ideas, exemplary entrepreneurship and exceptional performance: The BASF Board of Executive Directors pays tribute every year to employees whose projects have contributed significantly to the success of the company and BASF customers. The Innovation Award and Business Excellence Award go to the best teams in each category who succeeded in combining pioneership, passion and professionalism to perform outstanding services.

The awards will be presented at the Innovations Forum 2007 in Ludwigshafen today. The Business Excellence Award goes to the team responsible for developing a new marketing concept for light stabilizers for use in plastics. The Innovation Award honors two projects: expansion of the Citral Verbund, and development of catalysts for oil refineries. The two awards are each worth €50,000 in prize money and go to all team members collectively.

“Innovations are essential as a means of achieving profitable growth for BASF. The addition of innovative products and customer solutions to our portfolio is one of our most important goals,� said Dr. Stefan Marcinowski, Research Executive Director at the award ceremony.

Business Excellence Award: success with systematic marketing - The Business Excellence Award salutes tailored solutions based on meticulous knowledge of markets and customers' needs. With the support of a creative marketing concept, BASF advanced within just a few years from newbie status to Europe's number two in the light stabilizers for plastics market. Light absorbers protect synthetic products such as polycarbonate panels and artificial turf from aging and degradation due to solar exposure. The project team precisely identified the specific benefits of light stabilizers for particular applications. The exact requirements were identified in talks with companies along the entire value chain, enabling systematic marketing of the products under the Uvinul® brand name. As well as protecting the plastics, these light stabilizers also offer tangible production benefits by reducing both production processing times and machine downtime for cleaning.

Innovation Award: creative ideas professionally implemented - The Innovation Award is awarded to projects that have been professionally developed into innovations and which contribute on a sustained basis to the success of BASF and that of its customers. The first prizewinning project centers on citral, a chemical with an intensive lemon scent. The project aim was to use citral as a starting point for other products, thereby creating an integrated citral production system or Verbund. With sheer inventiveness and clever chemistry, the project team developed new citral-based synthesis systems for the aromachemicals linalool (lavender scent) and geraniol (rose scent), and for vitamin E. This innovative citral value chain makes BASF the world's largest citral supplier today, and the only one to manufacture vitamin E from this starting material. As a result, citral is now a key building block for fine chemicals at BASF.

The second prizewinning project concerns the further development of catalysts for oil refineries. In a bid to build up the catalyst business, the project team changed the structure of the process catalysts used for fluid cracking, a method used to separate and refine crude oil. The team developed a new catalyst structure called Distributed Matrix Structure (DMS). With the innovative DMS catalysts, the petroleum to be refined penetrates the catalyst better and is more effectively pre-separated than with conventional catalysts. This enables a high turnover and a higher yield of gasoline and other valuable liquid products. Thanks to DMS catalysts, BASF has advanced for the first time to the number one position in this market segment in the United States.

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