BASF CEO says slump to persist: paper

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The chief executive of BASF (BASF.DE), the world's largest chemical maker, said tentative signs of an economic recovery were being over interpreted, in an interview with German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Asked about the first signs of a pickup in demand, mentioned by heads of other chemical companies, he said he had no reason to revise his view that the slump is likely to persist.

"Things in the economy will not get notably better. Even if we had reached a trough we wouldn't have won anything from that," Juergen Hambrecht said in the interview published on Wednesday.

Sales volumes in some sub-segments were dropping by as much as 30-40 percent and small- and medium-sized companies among BASF's clients were still having a hard time getting loans from banks, he said.

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger; editing by Simon Jessop)