Chemical company BASF has decided to keep its North American headquarters in Florham Park. Chairman and CEO Hans Engel says New Jersey is a great state for his company’s headquarters. He sat down with NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider to discuss the decision to stay in the Garden State, his business and how the economy is going.
Engel said it was important for BASF to stay in New Jersey, where it has been for more than 40 years. “We have a workforce in New Jersey of more than 2,000 employees and we don’t take these decisions lightly,” he said. “New Jersey’s a great state for us to have our headquarters.”
He said BASF didn’t have any issues with the tax structure or policy changes in New Jersey. “Key to our decision was really where do we have our employee base for the headquarters? We didn’t want to disturb that,” Engel said. “We moved our employees in 2004 from Mount Olive to Florham Park. That was a bit of a disturbance. With this decision here, we wanted to stay in a stable environment that we know well, an environment where we know we have good access to the town that we need to run our business.”
BASF is building a double platinum building according to the standards of the U.S. Green Building Council, Engel said. “Our purpose is to create chemistry for a sustainable future and we wanted to display that with this building, what we can do, what our products can do and I think we’ve done a very good job there,” he said.
In addition to the Florham Park headquarters, BASF has a production site in Washington, a global headquarters for its catalyst division in Iselin and several smaller sites in other parts of New Jersey.
Engel said BASF will try to have higher sales and higher earnings in 2012. “We are on a good way to achieve that, but it is an ambitious target that we’ve set for ourselves,” he said.
Engel said he believes the U.S. will have a stronger economy in 2012 than in 2011 with 2 percent GDP growth. “I’ve seen consumer confidence pick up in the last 18 months and I think there’s something that has put the U.S. in particular back on the landscape of chemical production and that is natural gas and the relatively comparatively low natural gas price, which is one of our key raw materials that we use in the chemical industry,” he said.
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