Bayer AG - Stockholders' Newsletter Second Quarter 2007

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25 years ago: first CD made from Makrolon® high-tech plastic from Bayer MaterialScience

Bayer brought the first CD made from Makrolon® onto the market 25 years ago. The picture shows Volker Schacher inspecting CDs for impurities. In the foreground is a modern production facility.

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Bayer brought the first CD made from Makrolon® onto the market 25 years ago. The picture shows Volker Schacher inspecting CDs for impurities. In the foreground is a modern production facility.

Leverkusen. It is small and round, provides enjoyable, crackle-free, crystal-clear sound, and it set off an acoustic revolution 25 years ago: the first pop CD to be made from Bayer’s high-tech material Makrolon® was ABBA’s album “The Visitors” in 1982. The compact disc produced the songs of the Swedish cult band in a sound quality that was totally new at the time. Over the next few years this technology gradually ousted all analog recordings on records and magnetic tape. In 1996 it was followed by the DVD. Today the first HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs have reached the shelves, offering up to 80 times the capacity of a CD.

Better and better materials and technologies allow steadily increasing amounts of data to be stored on the discs. Developers already have their sights set on 800 to 1,600 gigabyte discs. For the last quarter of a century the base material for the storage of digital data has been the high-tech plastic Makrolon® from Bayer. The production of CDs was based from the start on a special grade of polycarbonate which – modified several times since then – still serves as the material for many data storage media. Since production began in 1982, over 90 billion optical data carriers have been made from Makrolon®.