BASF sells Ludwigshafen flats and cuts 2,500 jobs as €8.7bn China complex opens
German chemical giant BASF has cut around 2,500 jobs since 2022 at its Ludwigshafen headquarters and put thousands of company-owned apartments on the market, even as it inaugurated a €8.7 billion ($10 billion) complex in China last month — its largest-ever single investment. Works council chair Sinischa Horvat told AFP that "the mood is obviously not good" in the 175,000-person company town, where BASF still employs over 30,000 staff and has agreed to hold off on compulsory redundancies until at least 2028. The cuts sit inside a wider 124,000-job industrial drawdown across Germany in 2025 — roughly double the 2024 figure, according to consultancy EY — that has shrunk manufacturing's GDP share to 19.5%, with DIW president Marcel Fratzscher warning the losses are accelerating.
Industrial decline in Germany has begun to hit the company towns that built the country's manufacturing base, with BASF's home city of Ludwigshafen — population around 175,000, dominated by the chemical giant's sprawling Rhine-side plants — the latest case. The world's biggest chemical company has cut roughly 2,500 jobs in Ludwigshafen since 2022, with more cuts to come, and recently decided to sell off thousands of company-owned apartments occupied by current and former workers.
"The mood is obviously not good," Sinischa Horvat, chair of BASF's works council, told Agence France-Presse. "The entire market is currently so weak. When you watch the news, you hardly hear any positive messages." The apartment sale, he said, threatens a long-standing "symbiosis" between staff housing and the wider community that "fostered an understanding of chemistry and shaped the relationship with BASF in the city". Patrick Thiel, a 29-year-old BASF employee who lives in one of the apartments and recently stood as a Die Linke candidate in local polls, told AFP the sale "sends a signal to the city and to the people who live here … BASF is scaling back its operations", with "growing concern that this won't stop at the apartments but will also affect the main plant".
BASF, a supplier of base inputs to the agricultural, automotive and pharmaceutical sectors, says proceeds from the sale will go to bolstering its core businesses and that the disposal will be handled responsibly — "No one has to fear losing their home," a company spokesperson said. The group has agreed to hold off on compulsory redundancies in Ludwigshafen, where it still has over 30,000 staff — roughly a third of its global workforce — until at least 2028 and to keep investing locally. At the same time it is investing heavily overseas: last month it inaugurated a vast €8.7 billion ($10 billion) complex in China — its biggest single investment project ever — calling its presence in the world's biggest chemical market crucial.
BASF is one cell of a wider contraction. German industrial companies cut 124,000 jobs in 2025, around double the 2024 figure, with the heaviest losses concentrated in the struggling auto sector, according to a study by consultancy EY. The manufacturing sector contracted to 19.5% of the German economy in 2025, official figures show — its lowest share in many years. The companies hit run across autos, steel and factory equipment, squeezed by surging energy costs, Chinese competition and weak demand against the backdrop of Europe's biggest economy in a prolonged stagnation.
"The loss of industrial jobs in Germany has accelerated in the past two years," Marcel Fratzscher, president of the DIW economic institute, told AFP. "Companies that used to be the pride of Germany are suffering." Areas that have already lost industrial jobs tend to see greater social strain and offer ground for fringe parties such as the far-right Alternative for Germany to pick up support, he warned.
Fratzscher pushed back against treating the transformation as something to be reversed. The shift should be seen "as an opportunity to move into sectors that have better margins, better jobs", he said, and "the biggest mistake we can make is to try to cement the status quo, to keep all companies exactly the same. That would lead to a much bigger deindustrialization."