PETpla.net Insider 12 / 2014

EDITOUR REPORT 10 PET planet insider Vol. 15 No. 12/14 www.petpla.net Volume market, high credit rating by Waldemar Schmitke In-house operations were not only a novelty for Alpla at this point in time, but also in Europe as a whole. The practice at the time, for Italian customers and manufactur- ers across the continent, was to bolster their production by using more than one packaging supplier. Some began manufacturing themselves because of unreliability in the supply chain. According to Mr Fröis, the concept of in- house operation has proved itself all the way to the present day and the company has been successful in winning fur- ther customers in Italy through this strategy. The period 1989/90 saw the takeover of two further existing operations: one in Tortona, close by the existing operations, and an additional plant in Anzio, to the south of Rome. Both companies were manufacturing household articles by extrusion blow moulding process exclusively. However, the acquisitions enabled Alpla to succeed in gaining access to the broader packaging market in Italy. In 2001, the takeover of Tetra Pack Italia in Brembate, near Bergamo, saw the company’s entry into the PET bev- erages market. Three years later, in 2004, the addition of in-house PET production capacity in Nettuno, near Anzio, saw the start of PET container manufacturing for Colgate Palmolive. One of our visits on this tour of Italy took us to Tortona, situated 60km north of Genoa, where we dropped in on Alpla Italia. Here we met Andrä Fröis, Plant Manager, a native of Austria, who has been responsible for the development of Alpla Italia since 1985. According to Mr Fröis, Alpla, a specialist in plastics packaging, was something of a late arrival on the Italian scene; there were several companies already estab- lished in the sector. The start, in 1985, of in-house operation for Messrs. Henkel in Lomazzo, not far from Como, marked the com- pany’s entry into the Italian packaging market. By “in house operation” Alpla means a kind of vertical integration. A separate company established production capacity within the customer’s production facility for the manufacture of containers. For the first few years, extrusion blow moulding was the only technique Alpla employed as it concentrated on the manufacture of household and home care packag- ing items. Production capacity would subsequently be aug- mented with stretch blow moulding equipment. Nuremberg Milan Rome Naples Palermo Tunis Al giers Rabat Casablanca Marrakech Seville Madrid Lisbon Bologna Monastir Agadir Tan gier Valencia Cordoba Bilbao Oporto Andorra La Vella Venice Turin Florence Messina Barcelona Zaragoza ITALY Part 4