Following the presentation of the2022 financial results, the Managing Director of BASF Spain, Carles Navarro, took the opportunity to announce that an international engineering hub will be established in Spain, which he says “will develop projects for the whole of Europe and strengthen our international role within the group”.

The activities of the new facility will focus on two locations. On the one hand, it will use the facilities at the production plant in La Canonja (Tarragona), where it already has an engineering unit. And on the other hand, it will take advantage of its presence in Madrid to promote synergies with its main partners in engineering projects. In both cases, as Navarro emphasises, “this will involve new jobs being generated”.

Second hub in Spain
This is the second international hub that the company has set up in Spain in just four years. In 2019, BASF Digital Solutions, created to design digital solutions across the company, launched its activities worldwide. It now employs almost 500 people.

It was precisely in the field of digitalisation that Spain ratified its strategic position in 2022, thanks to the private 5G network being installed at the Tarragona production plant. It is one of the first privately owned 5G spectra in Spain, and the first for a company in the chemical industry. This allows the company to improve its production management and logistics, to name just a few advantages.

Forthcoming investments
BASF's investments in Spain this year will amount to 43 million euros, which will be used mainly to improve its facilities and processes. This is slightly lower than the 44 million euros budgeted in 2022, although the group did eventually reach 50 million euros, matching the 2021 figure.

The chemical company cites the car paint factory in Marchamalo (Guadalajara) as one of the major investments in recent years. A new application centre for the automotive industry, in which 16 million euros has been invested, will be inaugurated there in the second half of the year. Navarro contrasts this investment with the “complicated past few years” and with the difficult time the automotive industry is going through to emphasise that “the BASF Group and its body paint division are committed to the future in Guadalajara”.

Commitment to sustainability
Navarro, who says that maintaining the level of investment is “the main indicator of commitment to a region, but not the only one”, also speaks about responsibility in terms of sustainability, with 100% renewable electricity being used at eight of its Spanish facilities. In addition, the company has replaced a steam turbine with an electric motor at its propane dehydrogenation plant in Tarragona. This investment will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 34,000 tonnes per year and save more than 450,000 cubic metres of water.

Together with its customers, the company is also working on sustainable projects, such as the textile collection recently announced by the Inditex group, which replaces part of the raw materials of fossil origin with others from renewable sources. In an earlier collaboration, the two groups developed a detergent that reduces microfibre shedding by up to 80% and facilitates cold washing.

^{Photo: BASF}