Mobile Navigation

Business & Economics

View Comments

BASF, Sinopec, Dow and LyondellBasell top list of world’s largest chemical companies in 2019 sales

| By Scott Jenkins

ICIS (London, U.K.; www.icis.com) has announced its annual ICIS Top 100 Chemical Companies listing of global producers ranked by 2019 sales. This year, Germany’s BASF SE (Ludwigshafen; www.basf.com) regained the lead as the world’s largest chemical company with sales of $66.6 billion in 2019, a decline of 1.5% from 2018.

Coming in second was 2018’s leader, China-based Sinopec (www.sinopecgroup.com) with $63.2 billion in chemicals sales, followed by US-based Dow (www.dow.com) in third with $43.0 billion in revenues, U.S.-based LyondellBasell in fourth with $34.7 billion in sales and Saudi Arabia’s SABIC (www.sabic.com) in fifth with $32.5 billion in sales.

“2019 was a tough year for the global chemicals sector with declines in sales and profits almost across the board amid a manufacturing slowdown. This has been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, which will hit results even harder,” said Joseph Chang, Global Editor of ICIS Chemical Business.

The synchronized global manufacturing slowdown along with overcapacity in key chemicals markets made for a difficult 2019.

“The Top 100 companies generated revenues of $1.05 trillion in 2019 – down 4.9% on 2018 on a comparable, as reported, basis. The data show that 33 of the companies in this listing reported a fall in sales of more than 10%,” said Nigel Davis, ICIS Insight Editor.

This compares to a robust 2018 where the ICIS Top 100 Chemical Companies generated combined sales of $1.2 trillion, up 10% from a year earlier.