PETpla.net Insider 01+02 / 2010

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 10 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 01+02/10 www.petpla.net Part 3 Germany The interviews and reports from the sector now follow in Part III of our Regional Market report Germany. As already stated in Parts 1 and II, it is practically impossible to get anything official out of the bottlers for the big discounters. So I am all the more delighted that the suppliers and a few brand name bottlers have agreed to make themselves available for a Q and A session. On the sup- plier guilds side, we have Alpla, PET Ver- packungen, Uniplast and Bericap for you, whilst, as regards the bottlers, we shall be reporting on Romina, Hansa Heemann, Coca-Cola and Eckes Granini in issue 3. by Alexander Büchler Alpla For a report on Germany it is perhaps rather interesting to look at the market from the point of view of an outsider. We visited Alpla in Austria and asked the people there how they, as a company located outside the country, viewed Germany. We were able to talk to specialists from each of the key areas in the company - namely Sabrina Ger- bault who covers dairy products, Rolf Jötten who covers soft drinks, Thomas Findeis who is the factory manager at Hard, and Rolf Hutz who looks after the closures business. In total Alpla have 8 factories in Germany and preforms are moulded at Kaiserslautern, Baesweiler, Berlin, Vlotho- Exter and Lübeck. Alpla has actually been in Germany with several plants for 46 years - well before the arrival of PET - mainly with extrusion blow moulded HDPE containers. This finely tuned regional structure allowed Alpla, 15 years ago, to quickly take a share of the booming PET market across a wide geographical area. At that time Alpla had to make a key decision - whether to go for the single trip bottle or the returnable bottle business. A high percentage of the bottles required at that time were refillable bottles for Coca-Cola and the German min- eral water association. Nevertheless the company proprie- tors, Lehner, decided to go full out for single trip business, including PETcycle. Today the company still supplies small Regional market reports Germany Part 3