Can-Pack: 60m-euro business from contracts with beer and soft drinks heavyweights

With a much less visible business compared with that of beer multinationals, the domestic subsidiary of the Polish group, which owns an aluminium packaging plant in Bucharest with 160 employees, supplies 90% of beer cans sold by Heineken, SABMiller, InBev and Tuborg Romania. The remaining 10% of domestically delivered production is represented by a contract with another multinational, Coca-Cola.

Anticipating a surge in consumption on the premium segment, the company will invest 6m euros to boost the plant’s production capacity by 40%, to 900 million cans per year, from 650 million at present.

“We’re getting ready to install the additional production capacity (…),” stated Cristian Cornea, general manager of the Romanian subsidiary, who came to the helm of the company in February.

“Boosting capacity also entails larger quantities of paints and oils, which pushed us to invest in equipment for environmental protection,” he specified.

Cornea also says that if the market trend supports the company’s development, the plant can expand its capacity to 1.2 billion cans per year, its maximum capacity. For a new investment to be made, however, sales of beer in aluminium packaging need to increase.

The share of such sales in overall beer packaging amounts to 12%, compared to 30% in other countries. Until consumption rises on the premium segment, Can-Pack produces 2 million cans per day. For instance, the aluminium packaging accounts for 5-10% of the shelf price of a beer can, according to Can-Pack data.

Around 80% of the company’s production is distributed on the domestic market, whilst the remaining 20% is exported to Slovenia, Greece, India, Ukraine and even Poland. Next year, the company will have new export destinations, but the weight of the two markets will remain the same in Can-Pack’s annual turnover.

The company expects to generate 60m-euro turnover this year, up 27% year-on-year. “For 2009, we target 80m-euro turnover,” specified Cornea.

The expansion of production capacities will add 15 employees to the current 160.

“Finding workers is very hard. It took us two weeks to find five people to work in the plant,” he said.