List of largest chemical producers
"Chemical & Engineering News" publishes an annual list of the world's largest chemical producers by sales, excluding formulated products such as pharmaceutical drugs and coatings. In 2018, sales of the top fifty companies amounted to , an increase of 11.8% compared to the top fifty producers of 2017. The American Chemistry Council estimated that global chemical sales in 2014 rose by 3.7% to . In 2018, DowDuPont, the result of the 2017 merger between Dow Chemical and DuPont, became the world's top chemical producer ending BASF’s 12-year reign as the largest chemical company in  the world. However, in April 2019, DowDuPont then split into three separate firms—Dow, DuPont, and Corteva Agriscience. In 2018, more than half of the companies on the list were headquartered in the United States (10), Japan (8) or Germany (5); 18 countries in total were represented. In 2018, Forty-eight of the companies on the list disclosed chemical profits, which totaled , an increase of 1.3% from 2017. The average profit margin for chemical operations for these companies was 9.6%. Largest companies before 2019. Since "Chemical & Engineering News" began keeping records in 1989, BASF has been the world's largest  chemical producer by annual sales more frequently than any other company. The other companies that have headed the list are Dow Chemical, DowDuPont (which broke up into a Dow, a new DuPont, and Corteva Agriscience in 2019), Hoechst (which merged with Rhône-Poulenc in 1999 and is now a subsidiary of Sanofi), ICI (acquired by AkzoNobel in 2008) and Bayer.