For a long time, this never led to more than discussions, but in 1913 Astra was founded in Södertälje, and plans to produce some 40 pharmaceutical preparations were already drawn up.
These plans met with resistance, and therefore a Swedish merchant, Erik Kistner, formed a consortium which bought debt-ridden Astra back from the government for a symbolic price of one krona.
In the 1930s, Astra started to conduct its own research, initially on a very small scale, rather than just manufacturing existing pharmaceutical preparations.
The company Tika was acquired in 1939, and the pharmaceutical factories of Paul G. Nordström in Hässleholm (later renamed to Hässle, and operated as a division of Astra) in 1942.
In the 1940s, two product families were established which were to become quite important to Astra: penicillin and anaesthetics, initially in the form of Xylocain, which was introduced on the Swedish market in 1948.
This turn of events led to a revision of safety thinking in drug development, and to date it is still considered as the worst tragedy and scandal in the history of the Swedish pharmaceutical industry.
Despite losing out in the SSRI area, in the 1990s, Astra had become one of the heaviest companies on the Stockholm stock exchange, to a large extent due to profits from Losec.
Responding to increasing development costs of new drugs and a perception that the pharmaceutical industry needed more international mergers, Astra started to look for partners.