The original Merck is a 1668 Darmstadt pharmacy that grew into a science conglomerate
The world's oldest operating chemical and pharmaceutical company began when an apothecary named Friedrich Jacob Merck took over the Angel Pharmacy in Darmstadt in 1668. Three and a half centuries later the family still holds 70.3% of the shares. In North America, though, it cannot even use its own name.
Emanuel Merck, a descendant with a scientific training, took over the pharmacy in 1816 and isolated a series of alkaloids in its back laboratory. From 1827 he produced them in bulk, starting the shift from shop to factory; the firm pioneered commercial morphine and for a while had a near-monopoly on cocaine. A family member, George Merck, helped set up an American subsidiary in New York in 1891. The United States confiscated it after World War I, and that offshoot, now Merck & Co., keeps the name in the US and Canada. There the German company trades as EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Electronics, while advertising itself elsewhere as the original Merck.
Its record includes a dark period. Karl Emanuel Merck, who ran it under the Nazis, joined the party in 1933, and the company says 265 forced labourers worked at the Darmstadt plant during the war, most of them women from Russia and Poland. An air raid in December 1944 destroyed nearly 70 percent of the site.
Merck stayed private until listing in Frankfurt in 1995. It then transformed itself through big acquisitions: the Swiss biotech Serono for $13.2 billion in 2006, the laboratory supplier Millipore in 2010, Sigma-Aldrich for $17 billion, and a run of electronics materials firms. It walked away from a bid for Schering when Bayer stepped in, and sold its consumer health unit to Procter & Gamble. Today it runs healthcare, life science and electronics divisions, with about 60,000 staff, and opened a semiconductor plant in Kaohsiung in 2025.
It celebrated 350 years in 2018. The American namesake is now the larger company, and in 2024 reports noted that protesters were still mixing the two Mercks up.
Source: Merck Group
