CIECH S.A., established in Łódź, Poland in 1945, is one of the leaders in the European chemical industry. The CIECH Group consists of 8 manufacturing sites, in addition to trade and service businesses. Its annual revenues place the company among the top fifty Polish companies. In 2014, the company employed more than 3,900 people in Poland, Germany and Romania. CIECH is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since February 2005 and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since August 2016.
The company was founded in 1945 as state-controlled Centrala Importowo-Eksportowa Chemikalii i Aparatury Chemicznej". From the very beginning, the company was exporting its products — soda ash, carbide and zinc white — to 12 countries. The first registered office was located in Łódź, Poland. In 1946, CIECH moved its headquarters to Warsaw. In the following years, the company continued its operations, exporting its products to an increasing number of global markets. In the early 1960s, the company was renamed "Centrala Handlu Zagranicznego CIECH", in which "CIECH" was an abbreviation of the name "Centrala Importowo-Eksportowa Chemikaliów". The 1960s and 1970s brought the company successes on the sulphur market, nitrogenous fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints and varnishes. In 1976, nearly 95% of Polish chemical products were sold on foreign markets through CHZ CIECH. At the turn of the 1980s, at the beginning of the political transformation, CIECH was the largest foreign trade centre, with a monopoly for the delivery of oil to Polish refineries. In the 1990s, at the time when the centre celebrated its 45th anniversary, CIECH held the 97th place in the top hundred leading companies of the world. Poland's transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market economy entailed the loss of the monopoly for the delivery of oil. This coerced the company to transform into a modern and free marketchemical company. Therefore, in the 1990s, the company initiated the process of building a capital group, concentrating major national manufacturing sites around itself. These transformations were crowned by the company's entry to the Warsaw Stock Exchange in 2005, which proved a great success. It provided the company with access to capital and means of implementing bold activation measures. As a result of the company's listing on the stock exchange, its prestige increased, along with credibility and brand recognition. One year later, CIECH confirmed its position as one of the leaders of the European chemical industry by completing the purchase of the first foreign manufacturing subsidiary of the Group, a Romanian soda factory, "US Govora". In the same year, "ZCh Organika-Sarzyna" was also purchased. In 2007, the company acquired a German soda manufacturer, "Sodawerk Stassfurt", and fortified its position as the second largest soda manufacturer in Europe. In 2014, CIECH acquired a new majority shareholder, the international investment group Kulczyk Investments.
