Founded as a pharmacy in Darmstadt in 1668, Merck KGaA is the oldest pharmaceutical company still operating in the world. But it is not just pharmaceuticals. It is three businesses in one , Life Science, Healthcare, and Electronics , making it the most diversified company among OPPI members. In 2025, it posted €21.1 billion ($22.8 billion) in revenue with 62,461 employees and 3.1% organic growth.
In 1668, Friedrich Jacob Merck purchased the Engel-Apotheke (Angel Pharmacy) in Darmstadt, a small city in the state of Hesse in what is now Germany. This was 113 years before Takeda was founded in Japan, 132 years before the French Revolution, and three and a half centuries before the company that grew from that pharmacy would post €21.1 billion in annual revenue. No other pharmaceutical company in the world can trace its origins further back.
For its first two centuries, Merck remained what it started as: a pharmacy. The transformation into an industrial company began in 1827, when Heinrich Emanuel Merck started manufacturing alkaloids , morphine, codeine, quinine , at industrial scale in Darmstadt. This was pharmaceutical chemistry before the concept of a pharmaceutical industry existed. By the mid-nineteenth century, Merck was shipping chemical and pharmaceutical products across Europe and beyond.
The company’s longevity has not been a smooth arc. World War I stripped Merck of its American subsidiary. The entity that Heinrich Emanuel Merck had established in New York in 1891 was seized by the US Alien Property Custodian and sold. It became Merck & Co., an independent American company. The German and American Mercks have been separate since 1917. They share a name, a common ancestor, and nothing else. Outside the United States and Canada, the German Merck retains the right to the “Merck” name. Inside those two countries, it operates as “EMD” , an abbreviation of Emanuel Merck, Darmstadt. The name confusion is permanent and deliberate on neither side’s part. It is a scar from a world war.
What makes Merck KGaA structurally unusual is not its age but its breadth. The company operates three distinct business sectors, each of which would be a substantial standalone company.
Life Science is the largest, contributing approximately 44% of group sales. This is not drug discovery. It is the picks-and-shovels business of the biotech industry: laboratory reagents, analytical instruments, bioprocessing equipment, and the consumables that every pharmaceutical and biotech company needs to conduct research and manufacture biological drugs. When a competitor develops a monoclonal antibody, there is a reasonable chance that Merck KGaA supplied the cell culture media, the chromatography resins, or the filtration systems used in the process. The Life Science division operates under the MilliporeSigma brand in the US and Canada and under the Merck brand elsewhere.
Healthcare is the pharmaceutical arm, contributing approximately 38% of sales. The product portfolio includes Erbitux (cetuximab) for colorectal and head-and-neck cancers, Mavenclad (cladribine) for highly active relapsing multiple sclerosis, and Bavencio (avelumab), an immuno-oncology checkpoint inhibitor developed in partnership with Pfizer. The healthcare division also includes one of the most quietly consequential molecules in pharmaceutical history: Glucophage (metformin). Originally a Merck product, metformin is now the world’s most prescribed diabetes drug, taken by an estimated 150 million people globally. The molecule is off-patent, but its origins are Darmstadt.
Electronics is the smallest sector at approximately 18% of sales, and the most surprising. Merck KGaA is one of the world’s leading suppliers of specialty chemicals and materials for the semiconductor industry. Liquid crystals for display technology, photoresists for chip manufacturing, and functional materials for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) all fall within this division. It is a business that has nothing to do with healthcare but everything to do with the company’s underlying competency in specialty chemistry , a competency that traces directly back to Heinrich Emanuel Merck’s alkaloid manufacturing in 1827.
The relationship between the German Merck and the American Merck & Co. (known as MSD outside the US) is one of the most consequential corporate separations in pharmaceutical history. The story is straightforward in outline and permanently confusing in practice.
In 1891, Georg Merck, a grandson of Heinrich Emanuel, emigrated to the United States and established Merck & Co. in New York as a subsidiary of the Darmstadt parent. The American operation grew rapidly, importing and distributing German-manufactured chemicals and pharmaceuticals. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the US government seized German-owned assets, including the American Merck subsidiary. It was sold and became an independent company. Georg Merck eventually re-acquired a controlling interest, but the corporate link to Darmstadt was permanently severed.
The two companies coexisted for the next century under a name-sharing agreement. The German Merck retained the right to the “Merck” name everywhere except the US and Canada, where it uses “EMD.” The American Merck & Co. uses “Merck” in North America and “MSD” (Merck Sharp & Dohme) everywhere else. The agreement has held since the 1950s, but it means that a doctor in Mumbai seeing the word “Merck” on a product is looking at the German company, while a doctor in Manhattan seeing “Merck” is looking at the American one. Neither company is a subsidiary, licensee, or affiliate of the other. They share a name, a heritage, and nothing operational.
Sources: Merck KGaA Annual Reports 2021–2025. Frankfurt Stock Exchange (XETRA: MRK). OPPI member directory.