Part I - 1874-1945

"Ab ovo," which means "starting with the egg," is what the ancient Romans used to say when they wanted to explain something from the beginning. It is pure coincidence that the history of Brenntag started not with one egg, but with lots of eggs, when Philipp Mühsam, a Berlin businessman, founded an egg-wholesaling business in 1874.

The company wasted no time entering new lines of business, displaying the flexibility typical of a trading house. Canned goods were mentioned in the ledgers for 1878, and in 1879 an account entitled "drugs" that must have marked the start of its chemicals-trading business, appears for the first time. The subsequent years show that this line rapidly took off and eclipsed the company's traditional line of business by the early 1890s. The early decades of the new century continued to be successful as the company started trading in crude oil and motor fuels.

The first mention of a chemicals facility belonging to the company is in 1912, when an application for a patent regarding the denaturing of acetic acid was registered. When the company founder died in 1914, the business was managed jointly by his son, Dr. Kurt Mühsam, and Julius Herz.

During the 1920s rampant inflation and the need to pay for extensive gasoline imports and other foreign-made products made things extremely difficult. The conditions worsened once the Nazis came to power. In 1937 the Stinnes family acquired the company, renaming it "Brennstoff-, Chemikalien- und Transport A.-G." That rather lengthy name was abbreviated to the catchy "Brenntag" and registered in February 1938. At the close of the 1930s Brenntag's objectives as stated in its articles of incorporation were: "Wholesaling chemicals of all kinds, particularly motor fuels, along with other products of the mining, metallurgical, and chemical industries and agriculture, as well as trading in goods, finished goods, semi-finished goods, and finished products".

Part II - 1945-1964

Business operations were rather restricted due to Berlin being a divided city and only local business transactions could be handled from the Berlin-Britz facility. The real estate in the Soviet occupation zone had been expropriated as community property. The network of service stations outside West Berlin was later absorbed by the German Democratic Republic's state-owned "Minol" oil company.

Only 5 employees were brave enough to risk a new start in West Germany in 1948 when the company headquarters was moved from Berlin to Mülheim. Brenntag was still the personal property of the Stinnes family, and in addition to focusing on chemicals and petroleum products, they purchased several shipping operations. As other major corporations of the time, they focused on acquiring as many of the links in the value-added chain as possible.

Brenntag gradually expanded its warehousing organization and product lines throughout the 1950s by adding extensive lines of solvents, inorganic and organic chemicals, plastics, resins and specialty chemicals, thereby earning a spot for itself in the ranks of nationwide chemical distributors. The German chemical industry was unable to keep up with buyers' demands for many raw materials, which is why imports also became extremely important.

Hugo Stinnes, Jr. and Otto Stinnes and his family divided up the family-owned companies in 1952. Brenntag passed to Otto Stinnes, as did ownership of the Stinnes Bank. A dramatic chapter in Brenntag's corporate history began on a Sunday evening in October 1963, when Otto Stinnes notified Brenntag's managing directors that the Stinnes Bank would not be opening its doors for business the following morning due to acute liquidity problems.

That left Brenntag, which had been operating profitably all along, with no access to its liquid assets, at least for the time being. In order to satisfy claims arising from a bank loan, the Dresdner Bank was assigned a lien on Brenntag shares, which it proceeded to sell to the Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft.

Brenntag nevertheless managed to meet all of its financial obligations and remain in business. Just one year later in 1964, Hugh Stinnes AG bought Brenntag from the bank. The sale of Brenntag's network of 120 service stations was sold to Total G.m.b.H. as part of the strategy of concentrating more on industrial buyers and chemical distribution

Part III - 1965-1990

Brenntag launched partnerships in the mid-1960s with numerous manufacturers whose products it still sells today. We worked with both our western and eastern neighbors so successfully that even American manufacturers were interested in acquiring Brenntag during Stinnes Bank's negotiations with its creditors.

The sails for Brenntag's going multinational were set in the late 1960s when we started expanding outside of Germany. Our first foreign acquisition was NV Balder, a Belgian company acquired in 1966. In the 1970s Brenntag acquired a small distribution company in the United States, that formed the basis for the Stinnes Oil & Chemical Company (SOCO), which was reincorporated as Brenntag, Inc., in 1998. Companies in Denmark, Italy, France and Japan were all added in the pursuit of gaining a foothold in the European and North American chemicals distribution business. In the case of our Japanese subsidiary, which was a joint venture with a local partner, the major goal was exporting Japanese products to Europe.

Brenntag's international contracts turned out to be extremely valuable in 1973 when petroleum products were in short supply due to the oil crisis. By the 100th anniversary of our founding, Brenntag had approximately 600 employees and annual sales of DM 1 billion for the first time. In that same year a joint venture to import/export chemicals with Russia was formed. It was the second German-Russian joint venture, preceded only by the German company that imports Russian vodka.

In the 1980s, Brenntag turned its heating business and heating oil distribution operations over to Raab Karcher, receiving the latter's chemicals distribution business in exchange. Brenntag also expanded in the USA acquiring, Lynch (1980), Textile Chemical (1981), Delta (1986), Crown (1989), and PB&S Chemical (1989) - all traditional chemical distributors. We quickly declared our intention of becoming a market leader in the USA as well as in Europe.

Part IV - 1990-1999

Although Brenntag has a history stretching back more than 125 years and many basic elements of its operations have been established and expanding for decades - such as international relations with West and East - today's modern Brenntag is really a very young enterprise

Forward-looking strategy - modern Brenntag is created

It was not until the end of the Eighties and early Nineties that the decisions were taken which determined Brenntag's present position as one of the largest chemical distribution companies in the world. The modern Brenntag was created by purchases and numerous acquisitions.

There were so many purchases in the Nineties that only a few examples can be listed here. In Germany, Brenntag's acquisitions included Staub & Co., Wülfing (1994), Rühl (1995/96), CVH Hannover (1996) and Schuster & Sohn (1998). Some of these enterprises - such as Staub & Co. and CVH - are being successfully continued as joint ventures with their former owners. In 1996, chemical distribution activities in Germany were all concentrated in the Brenntag Chemiepartner GmbH.

In Italy, Weiss (1991), Sepic (1994) and parts of the Bombardieri-Cambiaghi Group (1998) were taken over. In the USA, Southchem (1993), Eastech (1993), Burris (1997), Milsolv and Whittaker (both 1998) were integrated into the Brenntag group. In 1999, there was acquisition of the Austrian Neuber Group, which has strong representation throughout eastern Europe.

Back to its roots: Brenntag in the eastern states of Germany

After German reunification, Brenntag acquired holdings in four of the total of seven locations of the former "VEB Chemiehandel" as early as 1990 and thus became almost overnight the number one in chemical distribution in the eastern states - right where the Philipp Mühsam A.-G. had been successful in the Twenties and Thirties.

Brenntag Eurochem: distribution of specialty chemicals

Brenntag Eurochem was formed in 1990 too and operates in the distribution of specialty chemicals. It started with a workforce of 35 which had already grown to 80 ten years later. Its sales program is divided into five application-specific divisions and its original sales region in Germany has been supplemented by subsidiaries in Poland, Austria and Switzerland (1997).

Restructuring of branches

The advantage of acquiring companies is that existing structures and customers can be taken over instead of creating new capacities on the market and thus intensifying competition. However, extensive management capacity is required for optimum integration of the different enterprises and the sales territories of each branch frequently need improvement.

This is why Brenntag has done intensive work on restructuring and modernizing warehouse locations in recent years. Two examples: a new distribution center was opened in Duisburg-Hüttenheim in September 1998 and a new logistics center started operation in Tournan near Paris in the summer of 1999. Both these locations are among the safest and most efficient chemical distribution centers in Europe.

1+1=3: the acquisition of HCI

September 1999 will long be seen as a milestone in corporate history, since this was the month in which Brenntag submitted a takeover bid to the shareholders in Holland Chemical International (HCI), which 99.1% of them accepted on November 15, 2000.

And so the worldwide leader in chemical distribution was created. At the time of the takeover, Brenntag was the market leader in Europe and held fourth place in North America, with more than one hundred locations and sales of about 1.5 billion EUR. HCI contributed sales of about 1.3 billion EUR and its position as the fifth largest chemicals distributor worldwide - with large market shares in, primarily, Scandinavia, eastern Europe and the USA. In Latin America, where Brenntag had not been represented hitherto, HCI was number one.

In this way, market positions are complementary and so is customer structure - Brenntag supplies large quantities to lacquer and paint manufacturers, to the plastics and food-processing industries and to the chemicals industry, whereas HCI's major customers are the oil and gas industry, personal care and the foodstuffs industry.

Integration teams started work as early as November 2000. Their mission was to forge from two major corporations a new and even more successful chemicals logistics enterprise. The target of both enterprises was to create the most innovative and profitable chemicals logistics service provider and offer customers additional benefits - on the basis of "1+1=3".

Brenntag today - the leading enterprise in chemicals logistics worldwide

Today, more than 125 years after being formed, Brenntag is the leading enterprise in chemicals logistics worldwide. Following its acquisition of HCI, Brenntag is number one in central, eastern and northern Europe, the third largest supplier in North America and the market leader in Latin America. A workforce of more than 10,000 is employed at approximately 300 locations.