For decades, BASF stood as a symbol of German industrial power: engineering, scale, integration and an almost religious confidence in Europe’s manufacturing superiority. Dow played a similar role in the United States, representing a chemical industry built on abundant energy, a deep domestic market and technological strength. When both companies start cutting costs, selling assets, reducing jobs and reviewing capacity, the problem is structural competitiveness.
That model has lost momentum against Chinese competition. Over the past two decades, China turned chemicals into a matter of national strategy. Cheap energy, financing, scale, selective protection and industrial coordination became part of the playbook. Europe became too expensive. The United States became more selective. Brazil’s petrochemical industry lost ambition.
That is the backdrop for Braskem. On Monday, June 8, if the expected transfer of control from Novonor to IG4 Capital is confirmed, Latin America’s largest petrochemical company will leave behind a long period of shareholder uncertainty. But the central point is not simply the replacement of a debt-pressured shareholder with an asset manager carrying a restructuring mandate. The more important design is elsewhere: Petrobras returns to the center of governance, through a shareholders’ agreement that gives the state-controlled oil company and the new controlling shareholder shared power over strategic decisions.
Petrobras’ possible return to petrochemicals recalls the role once played by Petroquisa, its former subsidiary, in shaping the sector in the 1970s. “Perhaps not exactly as in the past, but certainly as one of the protagonists of a new cycle of industrial development for Brazil,” wrote João Luiz Zuñeda, founding partner of MaxiQuim. The sentence matters because it avoids the easy trap between statism and pure market logic. What is at stake is coordination.
Braskem, therefore, does not need to become a disguised state company. It needs to become a viable industrial platform. That requires competitive gas, capital discipline, a solution for liabilities, regulatory predictability and active public-policy instruments to preserve local production. If BASF represents a Europe that has become too expensive to compete, and Dow represents an America that cuts capacity to protect margins, Braskem may represent something rarer: an attempt to rebuild industry in a country that still has raw materials and demand. Braskem does not need only a new owner. It needs an industrial reason to exist.