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Bayer Aktiengesellschaft
Bayer sells medicines, consumer health products, and seeds and pesticides to customers around the world.
Bayer is a German life-sciences giant that sells three very different things: prescription medicines, over-the-counter health products, and agricultural seeds and pesticides. Most people meet the company through its consumer brands — aspirin, Aleve, Claritin, and the drink mix Alka-Seltzer — which sit in drugstores and kitchen cabinets worldwide. Its pharmaceutical arm makes prescription drugs, and its crop-science arm sells seeds and chemicals that help farmers grow food.
The crop-science business is the biggest and most complicated piece. Bayer sells farmers seeds with built-in traits, like corn and soy that survive certain weedkillers, and then sells the weedkillers, most notably its Roundup brand of glyphosate. Bayer got Roundup by buying the American seed and chemical company Monsanto in 2018 for about $63 billion. That deal made Bayer the world's largest seed and pesticide company, but it also dragged Bayer into a legal nightmare: thousands of lawsuits from people claiming Roundup caused their cancer. Bayer has paid out billions in settlements, and the litigation has hung over the stock ever since. The pharmaceutical side sells drugs for heart conditions, eye disease, and cancer, and recently bet big on a prostate-cancer drug called Nubeqa and a kidney drug called Kerendia as future growth engines. The company also suffered a major setback in 2023 when an experimental blood thinner called asundexian failed a late-stage trial, wiping billions off its value in a single day and forcing management to rethink its strategy.
Bayer's problem is simple to state and hard to fix. Its three businesses don't obviously belong together, the Roundup litigation keeps costing money, and its drug pipeline hasn't delivered enough winners to offset patent expirations on older medicines. In 2023 the company replaced its chief executive and later moved to restructure, cutting jobs and weighing whether to split itself up. For investors, Bayer is a case study in how one huge acquisition can reshape a company — and saddle it with a problem that no amount of aspirin can cure.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026