Sachtleben produces particles using titanium dioxide, zinc sulfide and barium sulfate as the chemical basis, and markets these products worldwide.

Sachtleben also supplies special particles to the foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics industries, and has interests in the fields of chromatography, nanotechnology, catalysis, and the production of building materials.

The fledgling company achieved success against competing products only after numerous technical and chemical problems had been overcome, a process in which the young chemist Rudolf Sachtleben played a decisive role.

The success of the new product, coupled with low-cost recovery of zinc by means of chlorinating roasting of iron pyrites from Meggen, in Germany's hilly Sauerland region, paved the way for rapid expansion.

Sachtleben & Co. Lithopone Fabrik thus relocated to Duisburg in 1892, since the Rhine and the nearby Ruhr industrial region even then offered optimum conditions in terms of location, labor, transportation, and supplies of energy and water.

Sachtleben, its workforce and its facilities also suffered from the effects of inflation and the global economic crises during the First World War, the immediate post-war period and the subsequent occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in 1923.

For this reason, Sachtleben and DuPont de Nemours, of Wilmington, Delaware, USA, started a joint venture, Pigment Chemie GmbH, in 1959.

Production capacity for these specialties increased by a further 100,000 t/a, to 340,000 t/a, with the acquisition in 2012[2] of the facilities of the insolvent Crenox GmbH competitor, a former Bayer subsidiary, in Krefeld.