PETpla.net Insider 11 / 2011

REGIONAL MARKET REPORTS 12 PET planet insider Vol. 12 No. 11/11 www.petpla.net Neo Group Neo Group is the PET production line for Retal Indus- tries. In Klaipeda it produces 308,000t of bottle material. The company started in 2007 with their first delivery of granulate. After what was generally a difficult 2008 and 2009 , the plant has now been running at full capacity since 2010. It produces primarily NEOpet 82 with fast reheat additive and standard material NEOpet 80. The plant is made up of two blocks, each of 150,000t. A third block is still being mothballed due to the former difficult economic situation and Neogroup is consider- ing whether to build it up in the short term so that, from 2014, capacity can be further extended. Up to 2009 the company had focussed on the big customers; now that the plant is operating at full capacity their active customer base has risen to around 100 firms. From Klaipeda the Neo Group can, commercially speak- ing, reach pretty well any point in Europe. Portugal, in par- ticular, has made this possible for the Lithuanians. Here a competitor’s plant has recently been closed. They are keen to achieve strong growth in this market which lies practically at the other end of Europe. For some years now consump- tion within the EU has remained stable at around 2.9 mil- lion tonnes. Although the PET sector is currently register- ing growth in the east, higher levels of consumption are not coming about. One possible reason for this, in the opinion of Linas Bulzgys, CEO of the NEO Group, is the increase in the use of the lightweight preform / bottle design. Standing on the right is Linas Bulzgys explaining the PET plant to Alexander Büchler in the control room. Retal Europe Raimundas Luneckas CEO Retal Europe proudly showing off the new control of the Genesis dryer from Piovan. He is look- ing forward to energy savings of 30% as a result of this new concept. The second largest injection moulding location oper- ated by Retal industries after Retal Dnipro is situated in Lentvaris/Lithuania. Waiting for us there was a factory bay packed with 22 preform installations. “We have an installed capacity of 2.5 billion preforms and we actually manage up to 2.3 billion preforms each year“ says Technical Manager Janus Maculskis. The company would dearly love to put more machines in there; Raimundas Luneckas, the CEO, is thinking about two to three additional machines. How- ever, there is unfortunately no space left for them. So the Lithuanians have moved a multi-layer plant to France and installed it on the premises of their associate company, thus enabling a new Husky Monolayer plant to be installed. In view of their previous good experiences with Piovan, this is the first plant to feature Piovan’s new material drying system, Genesis. “We anticipate an energy consumption of 74Watt/kg PET during drying, this would be around 30% less than with material dryers up to now“ says Raimundas and he goes on “as the plant is still under construction we cannot, however, yet confirm the value for us, but we are quite confident”. The second largest injection moulding location operated by Retal is situated in lentvaris/Lithuania, with a capacity of 2.5 billion prefroms per year. Even the crisis which shook eastern Europe more significantly than other regions was unable to do much damage to the company. “ I believe we were able to keep up full production, even during the period of crisis, because we in our group have our PET production with our NEO Group subsidiary as well and have always been able to guarantee our customers full supply capability” says Janus. The supply area means pretty well any region within a radius of 2,000km, with the exception of the non-EU countries. The expansion of the Retal Group with the plant at Merseburg in Germany (see PETplanet insider issue 1+2/10) could only enhance the success of the Lithuani- ans. “The Germans produce only a few different types of