PETpla.net Insider 03 / 2010

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 12 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 03/10 www.petpla.net Medco Plast Mohamed H. Samaha, Chairman (on the right) is the second generation now running the still-young, 25 year-old family busi- ness. In the middle is Alexander Büchler. On the left is Medco Plast’s technical manager Ioan Dobas, who has been with the company since the first PET preform was produced here. Mohamed H. Samaha, chairman of Medco Plast in Cairo, has three businesses in the beverage and medical markets. He has a business that invests in pharmaceutical companies, a plastic packaging manufacturing operation (Medco Plast) which supplies both the pharmaceutical and the food / bever- age industries, and a trading company supplying plastics and chemicals to the above-mentioned sectors. Manufactured plastic packaging items include eye-drop- pers, aerosol and tablet dispensers – for the pharmaceutical industry, and various food containers (including thin wall and In-Mould labelling) for cheese, jam etc. plus crates for agricul- tural use and for beverage glass bottles, and of course PET preforms - which brings us to the matter in hand. Medco Plast’s PET story started in the year 2000, with one system based on a Husky GL 225 machine. As of today, concerning PET preforms, Mohamed Samaha sees his com- pany as way out in front. In only 4 years his preform produc- tion grew from 80 million to 450 million units p.a. This equates to a consumption of 15,000t of PET in 2009 and puts Medco Plast amongst the three biggest converters in the country. And Mr Samaha plans to invest further in this business. First of all, in the spring of this year, a new Husky turnkey system is scheduled to arrive and join the 4 systems already in place, enabling Medco to meet the full summer demand. He considers that the keys to such growth reside in the strategic partnerships that he has built up over the years, with the main bottlers Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, with the equipment manufacturers (namely Husky), with raw material suppliers and with various financial institutions. At the present moment, he is capitalizing on the reputa- tion gained by Medco in the market, and is starting new PET packaging applications for this area: hot filled juice and milk. In this regard, for the time being, Medco is the only manufac- turer in Egypt of hot fill preforms with a 38mm reinforced neck finish, while another planned “exclusive source” is related to the milk preforms, which will be added this spring to the com- pany’s preform portfolio. He is optimistic about both of these projects as he has supply contracts with the major players in the Egyptian market: Juhayna and Dina Farms. He is confident that this is only a beginning, as other juice companies and dairies in Egypt will follow this route. His plans do not end here, as he understands exactly the potential of the local market for multilayer preforms and Juice was always the preserve of cartons (40%), glass and HDPE bottles (30% between them) and pouches (30%). However this last bastion, with sales of 350 million litres, seems about to fall. The premium juice brand, Juhayna, has invested in a new hot-fill line and since December of 2009 has been sell- ing a juice drink in a 0.25l PET bottle. Al Marai of Saudi Arabia is working in collaboration with PepsiCo with the aim of intro- ducing juice and milk in PET into Egypt. Milk Although only just about finding its way onto the market, this is a hot topic of conversation in Egypt. Dina Farm (the country’s biggest milk producer) is on the point of launching fresh milk onto the market in PET bottles. Spirits, wine, beer For a largely Muslim country alcoholic beverages is obvi- ously a rather insignificant sector. Nevertheless, the country has some 42 million, mainly non-muslim, visitors each year, while a minority of the Egyptian population is also non-muslim. Even the ancient pharaohs brewed beer and fermented wine over 4,000 years ago. A few entrepreneurs are again latching on to these old traditions, but are filling, without exception, in glass. Preform production As has been mentioned earlier, Egypt is setting the trend for North Africa, so that 20% of preforms made by Egyptian converters go to neighbouring countries. Apart from Nestlé, no beverage fillers have any preform manufacture worth mention- ing. Nestlé, with about 200 million preforms per annum, has chosen the Netstal system, whilst other converters such as Marina Plast, Medco Plast and Al Aquah are running Husky lines and a few old Engel machines, producing a total of about 1.9 billion preforms, and growing by a least 10% per annum. A small but attractive niche has been developed in the pharmaceutical sector at Taba with the support of KraussMaffei. Stretch blow moulding Here in Egypt a Corpoplast machine is still called what it was called long ago - a Krupp! However Corpoplast has at present no market here. The beverage business is split between Sidel and Krones.