Alumnus Stephan Kothrade: from chemistry student to CTO at BASF

When Stephan Kothrade wants to illustrate the sheer inexhaustible application possibilities of organic chemistry with a simple example, he can draw on his first experiences at the multinational chemical company BASF. “Thirty years ago, I was starting out in plastics research and studying products in the lab for the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. For example, I worked with colleagues on a conditioner for shampoos, which was subsequently launched on the market. Those were my first steps.”

Today, Kothrade is no longer working in a laboratory, but is one of the heads of the Dax-listed company. Specifically, he is Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a role he characterizes as follows: “My job is about knowledge management and, at its core, about finding the best ways of using the 2.1 billion euros we allocate for research and development worldwide every year. Which applications and novel sustainable technologies will we invest in? With a focus on innovations, my job is very exciting,” says the LMU alumnus with a stellar career at the global corporation.

Student years at LMU

Kothrade’s BASF career began while he was still writing his doctoral thesis at LMU. In organic chemistry, what else? This branch of science has fascinated him since his schooldays. But it could easily have been otherwise.

Born in Landshut in 1967, his early years were spent in various cities. When he was nine years old, his family settled in the Munich neighborhood of Maxvorstadt. “Munich is my home town,” he emphasizes and points out that his parents still live there. He attended the Gisela academic high school at Elisabeth-Platz. “Thinking back to those days, I was actually unsure for a long time what I should do after school. I was interested in literature and considered Romance studies for a while, but the natural sciences were always appealing as well, especially biology and chemistry. In the end I went for chemistry, because I found the application side of things exciting and was drawn by the prospect of working in the industry one day.”

This was one of the reasons why Kothrade came to LMU. “At the time, LMU offered biochemistry as an elective subject, and of course the university had a good reputation as well. So there was no need to go elsewhere and I wound up studying chemistry.” In those days, the Chemical Institute was on Meiserstraße (today’s Katharina-von-Bora-Straße), right around the corner from his parental home in Maxvorstadt. Although Kothrade studied in these familiar surroundings, he “no longer lived a sheltered life at home with my parents.” He got married soon afterward, to a mathematics student, and the couple “lived together in a small apartment and got by on little money.”

As a freshman, Kothrade found university life well organized. “In chemistry courses, everything is timetabled, because you have lots of mandatory internships and spend all day at the institute. Seminars and lectures in the morning and internships in the afternoon, even outside of semesters.” He thoroughly enjoyed the experience, partly because the lectures were so interesting.

He suspects things might be different today. He hears from his children, for example, that it is not even worth going to lectures because you can get everything online. In his day, lectures were essential. He recalls the classes of Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, for instance, who did great things for research in Germany and shaped LMU’s development: “What he could do with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard and the stories he would tell … I was captivated; for me it was time well spent,” says the member of the BASF Board of Executive Directors.

As part of Kothrade’s studies, he received training in skills like setting up and maintaining apparatuses and procuring and disposing of chemicals. This manual element suited him down to the ground. Handling of chemicals was fairly lax in those days. The financial managers across the road on Meiserstraße often complained about the odors wafting over. “A colleague of mine was working on sulfur compounds in the lab, and the smell would get everywhere, in people’s hair and clothing,” says Kothrade. “On the subway home I’d always have space to myself, as nobody wanted to stand or sit next to me.”

Student life and meal vouchers

The young married couple had little money. Fortunately, the husband got a half-time job at the university while completing his degree dissertation. This entitled him to meal vouchers worth 35 deutschmarks once a month, which could be redeemed not only in the university cafeteria, but also in many establishments around Maxvorstadt. “When I got the vouchers, we’d go out for a meal,” recalls Kothrade. “That was luxury for us.”

Later, while doing his doctoral thesis, he made his first contacts at BASF. His supervisor at LMU had a collaboration with the chemical company, which then became part of his dissertation. In this way, he got to know people at the plastics laboratory. “This was a big help when I joined BASF in 1995. This was a major step in my life – and also a big relief, as our son was a year old at the time.”

Importance of China for chemical industry

The next career milestone arrived in 1998 with a promotion to plant manager. From there he climbed the ranks until his appointment to the BASF Board of Executive Directors in 2023, and to the role of CTO the following year. Kothrade often spent time abroad, above all in Asia. This sharpened his appreciation of the possibilities of organic chemistry and his assessment of the current upheavals in geopolitics and business. China is “a giant that cannot be ignored,” he stresses. He lived and worked in the country for ten years, including in a joint venture between BASF and Sinopec, the state oil and petrochemicals corporation.

China is an important market for BASF, says the CTO and laments that in the whole discourse around China “people are always highlighting the contrasts and obsessing about the political system.” But we also need to see the commonalities. In facing the major challenges presented by climate change, “we cannot make progress without China as a partner.”

Over the coming decade, 70 percent of global growth in the chemical sector will come from China. “However, only about 15 percent of our global turnover is in China, so we need to increase our investment there.” And the same goes for the company’s Ludwigshafen site, where BASF is spending two billion euros annually on the construction of new facilities and the modernization of existing ones. “Sometimes people misunderstand this: We’re not relocating to China. We’re manufacturing where our customers live. That has always been our strategy.”

Sustainability and the green transformation

In Kothrade’s view, the chemical industry can contribute “a huge amount” to climate action while being economically successful. For this reason, he advises young people to study chemistry: “We need smart people, including from LMU – at Ludwigshafen, for example, our largest research location.”

The chemical industry is at the start of many value chains, he explains. Whether it manufactures chemicals for pharmaceutical products, household detergents, textiles, packaging, the auto sector, aerospace, or semiconductors, it is where a significant portion of total emissions originate. This is where we need to direct our energies and “facilitate the green transformation of our customers” with sustainable products. For BASF, Kothrade cites the CO₂ target as “net-zero emissions by 2050.”

As an example, he mentions a pilot facility in Shanghai which manufactures a polyamide for the textile industry that is made 100 percent from textile waste. At Ludwigshafen, meanwhile, BASF, together with partners SABIC and Linde, operates the world’s first industrial-scale demonstration plant for electrically heated steam cracking furnaces – the eFurnace project. This technology uses electricity from renewables instead of fossil fuels to heat the cracking furnaces, reducing CO₂ emissions by over 90 percent. Moreover, Ludwigshafen is home to one of the largest water electrolysis plants for the production of green hydrogen. And in the future, it will have the world’s largest industrial heat pump, which will convert waste heat into steam without any CO₂ emissions. This steam will then be used as an energy source on site.

Although the well-traveled BASF executive does not have any connections with LMU anymore, he did have a surprising reunion recently: “At my daughter’s school-leaving party in a Shanghai hotel, I met an old student acquaintance for the first time in 25 years. It’s a small world sometimes.”