BASF is the chemicals and plastics company most prolific at making international expansions, followed by Air Liquide and Linde. GlobalData’s chemicals and plastics foreign direct investment (FDI) company report highlights the current foreign investments made by leading chemicals and plastics investors. Buy the report here.

BASF has been the most active chemicals and plastics greenfield investor between Q1 2019 and Q2 2024, according to GlobalData’s FDI Projects Database. The parent company has been actively investing through several of its subsidiaries/company divisions.

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Greenfield foreign direct investment is when a company invests abroad to establish a new physical presence or expand an existing operation. Greenfield investments create jobs and/or involve a capital investment into the foreign location. Other forms of FDI, such as mergers and acquisitions, are not included as part of this definition.

The majority of BASF investments were in the other chemicals subsector. In fact, 21.3% of its total foreign investments were in this subsector. It also created projects across a further 31 subsectors.

By business function, most (57.5%) of BASF projects were related to manufacturing. R&D and Sales, administration & marketing were the next most popular operations undertaken by BASF.

The company has been active across seven world regions, mainly focused on Asia which received 43.8% of the company’s greenfield investments between Q1 2019 and Q2 2024. Its top three destination countries (by number of greenfield FDI projects) were China, the US and Belgium. Combined these three countries account for 61.1% of its total number of chemicals and plastics investments.

BASF created more FDI projects in 2022 compared to any other year between Q1 2019 and Q2 2024.

Other leading FDI project generators in the chemicals and plastics industry include Air Liquide, Linde, Henkel and RAG-Stiftung.

The US is the leading source market for outbound chemicals and plastics greenfield FDI projects. The country accounts for 17.8% of total outbound chemicals and plastics investment projects. There have been 204 unique parent companies from the US that have announced chemicals and plastics FDI projects between between Q1 2019 and Q2 2024.

To further understand the top chemicals and plastics investors FDI companies, access GlobalData’s Top chemicals and plastics investors Foreign Direct Investment Companies report.

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GlobalData, the leading provider of industry intelligence, provided the underlying data, research, and analysis used to produce this article.

GlobalData’s FDI Projects Database records greenfield FDI throughout the world in real-time. The data can be used to analyse company cross-border expansion activities as well as identify industry, thematic and geographic trends.