 In 2011, Sanofi-Aventis decided to drop the Aventis suffix and change its name to Sanofi.In 1997, its chemicals division was spun off into a separate company named Rhodia and was later acquired by the Solvay group in 2011.The agricultural chemicals division of Rhône-Poulenc, known as Aventis CropScience after the merger with Hoechst, was sold to the German chemical and pharmaceutical company Bayer in 2002.