By Peter Lessmann
The company that brought out aspirin more than a century ago, German chemical giant Bayer, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year and taking stock of a history that mixes great good with great evil.
Aspirin has long been out of patent protection, but if you want the original, you can still buy Bayer’s pills in a green-and-white carton with Bayer’s trademark cross logo on it.
What began on August 1, 1863 as a small dyes factory in Barmen, close to Wuppertal in Germany’s west, is now a pharmaceuticals and chemicals conglomerate with 110,500 employees and almost €40bn ($52bn) in annual revenues.
In its official company history, entitled “Milestones,” Bayer calls its great invention, aspirin, “a pharmaceutical miracle.”
There’s hardly a medical cabinet anywhere on the planet that doesn’t have a few aspirin to cure aches and pains, to reduce fever or as an anti-inflammatory medication. It is used to help prevent heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots and even to ward off cancer.
Only one other Bayer medication has achieved similar fame — the anti-cholesterol medication Lipobay — but its notoriety was all negative. Bayer had to take it off the market in 2001 after suspicions arose that it may have been partly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of patients.
That plunged the concern into its deepest crisis ever, but under then chief executive Werner Wenning, Bayer began a turnaround. The Bayer story began 150 years ago when businesmann Frieder Bayer and a dye-maker, Johann Friedrich Weskott, launched their Fried Bayer & Co. with one aim — to make money. It was an age when a series of enterprising Germans founded what later became mighty firms.
A few months before, near Frankfurt, yet another dye factory was set up that would also develop into an industrial giant — Hoechst. Two years later came the third of the dye-based giants, BASF.
Bayer, Hoechst and BASF became the backbone of the chemical industry of the emerging German nation-state. Soon, Bayer had its first production sites abroad and the company became a stock corporation. It got its footing in agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals and in 1912 moved its headquarters to Leverkusen near Cologne where is now occupies a vast compound.
The story of Bayer and the entire German chemical industry would not be complete without also describing its darkest chapter: the factories’ support of the Nazi regime.
Nearly a decade before the Nazi takeover in 1933, Bayer had lost its independence when it was merged in 1925 into a superconglomerate called IG Farben, along with Hoechst, BASF and other firms.
The driving force behind the conglomerate was Bayer boss Carl Duisberg, who since the turn of the century had been pushing for such a merger. Once the Nazis came to power, they had an easy time harnessing this colossal chemical enterprise to their war machinery.
Chemicals played a key role in war crimes. IG Farben, together with another company, Degussa, became involved with Degesch, the producer of the poison gas Zyklon B ,which was used to kill millions of people in the Nazi death camps.
The use of slave labour became the norm throughout German industry during the war.
In Bayer’s warts-and-all account, in the IG Farben plant in Leverkusen there were 4,300 such labourers in the autumn of 1944. Historian Peter Hayes, writing about IG Farben, notes that a large share of the company’s growth was during the war years and came at the expense of the victims of Nazism.
Bayer has striven to acknowledge those evils and to atone for them. After the war, IG Farben was broken up again, with Bayer being newly founded in December 1951. The company gathered momentum and steadily built up its foreign operations, while developing into an integrated chemicals-pharmaceuticals enterprise.
Like the overall chemical and pharmaceuticals sector in Germany, Bayer has undergone great change in recent years. Increasingly, it is concentrating on the area of life sciences, comprising health products and pesticides.
This accounts for around two-thirds of its group revenues.
In 2004 Bayer divested itself of some less-lucrative chemical operations. These would later on reappear as the Lanxess company.
In 2006 Bayer made its most expensive acquisition ever, the pharmaceuticals company Schering, and merged its pharmaceuticals division with Schering. Bayer also sold its photographic-film unit Agfa and built up its pesticide portfolio by taking over the Aventis CropScience unit.
Altogether, Bayer today stands for a broad range of products, from medications and medical diagnostics equipment to insecticides, seeds and high-value synthetics. And, it is one of Germany’s leaders in scientific research, spending €3bn annually on R&D. — DPA