Mumbai, Nov 22 :    Mumbai, Nov 22:  BASF AG, which has taken a majority stake in the Chatterjee group promoted Pushpa Polymers Pvt Ltd, has renamed the company as BASF Styrenics Pvt Ltd. BASF has assumed operational as well as management control of BASF Styrenics. The European polystyrene major had, recently, formed a strategic alliance with the New York-based Chatterjee group for the manufacturing and sales of polystyrene in India. 'There exists a huge future potential of the Indian plastics market and styrenic polymers market in particular,' said Prasad Chandran, chairman and managing director of BASF India Ltd. Addressing newspersons, Werner Praetorius, head of BASF's styrenic polymers division said 'With BASF Styrenics we will build up a strong and profitable position in one of the most important growth markets for polystyrene in Asia.' BASF BASF Styrenics has a capacity of 60,000 metric tonnes polystyrene in Dahej, Gujarat. However, BASF officials were not forthcoming with more details of the size of the investment and exact equity holding of the two partners. The plant was shut down for the last two months. Reasons for the closure was not known and BASF officials were not willing to comment on this issue. The primary applications for polystyrene are packaging and disposable products, households appliances and housings for consumer electronics. BASF has a worldwide capacity of 1.5 million metric tonnes polystyrene per year with world-scale plants in Europe, North and Latin America and Asia. The products range from rigid and transparent general purpose plastics to high impact-resistant grades that customers transform using injection moulding, extrusion and blow-moulding technology. BASF AG sales in 1999 stood at $ 29.5 billion making it one of the largest petro-chemical company in the world having also interests in crop protection products and pharmaceuticals.