Bayer AG

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Bayer Aktiengesellschaft (Bayer AG for short), headquartered in Leverkusen, is a listed chemical and pharmaceutical group with a total of around 101,000 employees (as of December 31, 2022). The business is managed through the three divisions Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health and Crop Science. In 2022, the Bayer Group generated a Group profit of 4.2 billion euros with a turnover of around 50.7 billion euros, half of the total turnover is accounted for by the agricultural division. The Bayer Group invested 6.16 billion euros in research and development in 2022.

The name Bayer is also known through the subsidiary Bayer 04 Leverkusen, which is active in the football sector. Between 2002 and 2005, in one of the largest phases of change in the company’s history, the original pharmaceuticals, plant protection, chemicals and plastics divisions were spun off and restructured as subgroups.

History

Establishment phase and growth

The company was founded on 1 August 1863 in Barmen, in today's Wuppertal district of Heckinghausen, by Friedrich Bayer (1825-1880) and Johann Friedrich Weskott under the company "Friedr". Bayer et comp. According to his training, Friedrich Bayer performed the commercial tasks within the still small company. Weskott had completed a dyeing apprenticeship and acquired chemical knowledge, which he brought to the production. Important products for the company were Fuchsin and Aniline.

In 1878, the headquarters and most of the production facilities were moved to a larger site in Elberfeld.
In 1881, after Bayer’s death under the leadership of his son Friedrich Bayer (1851–1920), who had joined the company as a chemist in 1873, the company was incorporated into the joint stock company “Farbenfabriken vorm”. Friedr. Bayer & Co., the company also called Elberfelder Farbenfabriken, was created. In 1882, Henry Theodore Böttinger was appointed to the company’s board of directors. In 1883, chemist Carl Duisberg joined Bayer and, after his successes, expanded his chemical research in 1888. Together, Bayer, Böttinger and Duisberg steadily expanded the company’s business activities; After Bayer’s death, his son Richard Bayer was represented on the company’s supervisory board from 1920 to 1960. A modern scientific laboratory was established in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.

The number of employees had increased to more than 300 employees. In the Elberfeld laboratories, the effects of diacetylmorphine, acetylsalicylic acid and sulfonamides were researched and discovered in the following decades, which were marketed in the new century under the brand names heroin, aspirin and prontosil and became important for the later recognition of the company. The patent on the already existing research on heroin had the company on 26. Acquired June 1896. With the sulfonamide Prontosil, Bayer introduced the world's first chemotherapeutic drug, which is used as a broadband drug