That Certain Something

Claudia Bramlage watches intently as a vehicle the size of a shoebox whirs into motion, a can of white paint on board. It zips across the lab on a thin metal rail, braking before every bend and then picking up speed again. When it stops, a robotic arm is already waiting. The arm dips a sponge into the paint and rolls it across a piece of cardboard in sweeping strokes—just as a person would paint a wall.                                                                                     

Bramlage, who runs the lab at chemicals company Altana, studies the result with a critical eye: for the most part, the paint has gone on smoothly, but in a few places it has formed small bubbles. “That’s fine,” she says with a shrug. “We need bad results, too.”

This sequence runs just over 200 times a day in Altana’s digital lab in Wesel, on the Lower Rhine. It tests whether the chemicals give the paint the effect it is meant to have. If they don’t, development continues. Even then, says Altana CEO Martin Babilas, the run was worth it, because failed attempts produce information, too. “Data is an extremely valuable asset for us.”

It’s the kind of line CEOs like to drop at a time when AI companies are making a fortune from data and what they can extract from it. With Babilas, though, it is more than lip service.

Altana collects data across its entire value chain. In the synthesis lab, chemists study the conditions under which new compounds form. The application lab then shows how the products developed from them hold up in practice. This is how Altana manages something a growing number of German companies have been struggling with lately: getting new products to market faster than the competition—including rivals from China.

Every year, Altana invests almost seven percent of Group sales in research and development—more than twice the industry average. And it is building again in Wesel: a new laboratory complex costing 25 million euros. It will be even bigger, more expensive, and more advanced than the lab Bramlage has run since 2022.

Altana can afford it. In the first half of 2026, the company generated sales of 1.7 billion euros, up three percent on the same period last year. Earnings rose by as much as 14 percent, to 332 million euros. What makes these figures remarkable is the state of the industry around them: Germany’s chemical sector is in its deepest crisis in decades. A weak economy, high energy costs, and competition from China are taking their toll. Many companies are cutting jobs and shutting down plants. There has been a very slight uptick recently—but even that is a one-off effect of the Iran war.

Core product: additives:

Outside the industry, hardly anyone has heard of Altana. Yet its products are everywhere, as Babilas demonstrates by picking up the water bottle on the conference table. “If you look at the underside of a bottle cap, there’s a very good chance the seal came from us,” he says. Altana is also part of everyday life through car paint: the company supplies metallic pigments that go into the vast majority of colors.

Altana’s most important business is additives. Michael Schmidt, the division’s chief technology officer, leads the way to the next lab. He grabs a beaker and mixes the ingredients of a paint: solvent as the base, resin as the binder, plus blue pigments. He starts stirring with a spatula, but it is heavy going. Then he takes a pipette and adds a few drops of Altana additives. He stirs again—and suddenly the spatula glides easily through the blue mass. “A pinch of salt can change the taste of an entire soup,” says Schmidt. Additives work in much the same way: “Even though only tiny amounts go into a product, they fundamentally change its properties.”

Additives are used in a wide range of industries. When a ship’s hull is painted, the paint must not run and pool along the bottom edge. Other additives help different materials bond better—essential for wind turbines, whose rotor blades are exposed to enormous forces and need to be both tough and light. Still others stop paint from foaming as it is applied.

Each additive is therefore tailored to a specific application and a specific customer. That makes Altana indispensable to many of them—and makes them willing to pay more. Besides, compared with the price of the main ingredients, the tiny amount of Altana additive costs very little. The result is high margins: most recently just under 20 percent, more than at other specialty chemicals makers such as Evonik (13 percent) or Lanxess (9 percent).

Another advantage is that Altana isn’t heavily exposed to any one industry: no single sector accounts for more than a fifth of sales. “We’re not dependent on any one market,” says Babilas. When one industry is struggling, another can often make up for it. The automotive industry accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of Altana’s sales. “It’s an important sector,” says Babilas, “but our fate doesn’t hinge on it.” Altana was able to offset the slump in automotive with rising demand from the electrical and electronics industry, where its products are used in computers, renewable energy systems, and data centers, among other things.

Small, and no cracker

But tailor-made solutions for many industries are only part of the story. Another part is visible from Babilas’s office: behind the glass front lie the production halls. Compared with the sprawling chemical sites typical of the industry, the ones in Wesel look small. That’s because Altana lacks a key element: a cracker.

In these furnaces, long hydrocarbon chains are broken down at high temperatures into smaller building blocks such as ethylene and propylene, which then have to be cooled, compressed, and separated. Owning a cracker means you can produce all the basic chemicals yourself—but you also have to live with enormous energy bills. At Altana, energy costs amount to a low single-digit percentage of sales. “That’s significant, but it’s not the decisive cost factor,” says Babilas.

A focus on specialty chemicals alone is no guarantee of success, cautions Hubert Schönberger, a chemicals expert at consultancy BCG. “In specialty chemicals, there’s a risk of spreading yourself too thin.” A company can quickly turn into “a kind of general store” with no clear focus. BASF, for example, is going the opposite way and betting everything on basic chemicals.

Babilas is well aware of the risks. Until 2007, the group made pharmaceuticals as well as specialty chemicals, and the pharma business was considerably larger. That didn’t sit well with major shareholder Susanne Klatten. She had the pharma division sold, refocused Altana on specialty chemicals—and bought up more shares. In 2010, she took full ownership of Altana and took it private.

Beyond that focus, Altana also benefits from its clear ownership structure, says Babilas: “One of Altana’s strengths is that it can chart its own course, free from short-term thinking and economic cycles.” That is how Altana was able to expand with two major acquisitions in late 2023, in the middle of the energy crisis.

That said, there is another side to the story: the success of German chemicals company Altana also rests on the fact that it no longer has much to do with the German market. Altana generates 90 percent of its sales abroad.

Even so, Babilas has nothing bad to say about Germany as a business location. Many of the company’s innovations and patents originate here, he stresses. And despite weak sales at home, he says, German production still plays a key role and can hold its own against global competition. At the start of this year, a new production line came on stream in Wesel. Among other things, it makes additives used to manufacture electrodes for high-performance batteries.

Growth through regulation

Altana also sees new opportunities where others mainly see costs: in regulation. The company employs a team of specialists who track, day in and day out, what is coming down the line for its customers’ industries—so that Altana can develop the products they will need. The department is booming: a few years ago, it was a handful of people; today, it numbers in the hundreds. Take the packaging industry: from 2030, packaging will have to meet certain recycling requirements. Altana’s additives make it easier to separate a package’s components after use.

But however bright Altana’s growth prospects, they could soon run up against their limits in Wesel. The company has been based here since the 1960s and has expanded piece by piece. As a result, you can open a door in a building with faded vinyl flooring and mint-green wall panels and suddenly find yourself standing on glossy black tiles, looking out through floor-to-ceiling windows. Even employees get lost in this warren of staircases, corridors, offices, and labs.

Lab head Bramlage is counting on one of Altana’s strengths: creativity. Finding a site for the new paint lab took a long time, too. Because the paint cans travel on a rail network, it needed a large area on a single level. Necessity proved the mother of invention: the solution turned out to be the empty space beneath the employee parking garage.