PETpla.net Insider 11 / 2020

CAPS & CLOSURES 36 PETplanet Insider Vol. 21 No. 11/20 www.petpla.net Michael Krueger, CEO Corvaglia, on strategies to be well positioned in a competitive market Boosting business Corvaglia is well known as a mould and cap manufacturer. For a while now, the company has been aiming to increase its cap production. We met Michael Krueger, CEO of Corvaglia and asked about his strategy. Other topics included tethered caps and of course the coronavirus. PETplanet: Hello Michael. In my view, cap production has always been something of an afterthought to mould making. Now you want to build up this area? Michael Krueger: It has always been our strategy to produce and sell caps. Now we want to boost business and have expanded our production to do so. Two years ago, a new factory was constructed in the USA. But we have expanded our capacities here in Switzerland too. PETplanet: Is it not difficult when you sell moulds and caps at the same time in the same market? Don’t your mould customers give you competition? Michael Krueger: In mould making, we work closely with regional partners. We do not go into those markets with our caps. We only over- lap in Europe to a certain extent, but we have been able to manage it so far. And for the bottlers and brand owners it is certainly no disadvantage to have options. In the USA, we had only built moulds for bottlers’ inhouse production so here the market is com- pletely open for us. And we are pro- ducing and manufacturing beverage caps in Mexico for 17 years now. PETplanet: Caps are a highly competitive market, the margins are low and you want to supply Europe from a high-wage country like Switzer- land? Michael Krueger: We have greatly automated our cap produc- tion here in Eschlikon. Using an intelligent transport system, we can carry the caps from the machines and send them for further processing or for packing. The manpower we free from such intralogistics duties is used to expand production. After investing in automatisation, we produce more caps with the same amount of people on the shop floor. PETplanet: Why did you want to manufacture so much more caps than before in Switzerland? Michael Krueger: Previously, we had focussed on production of sports caps and unprinted flat caps in Swit- zerland. That was a contrast e.g, to our Mexican operations, where we are producing significantly higher volumes since a long time. As we were suc- cessful in Mexico, we wanted to proof a couple of years ago that it is pos- sible on our ‘home turf’, too. PETplanet: Did you encounter challenges along the way? Michael Krueger: Extending the flat cap portfolio was the easy part as we utilise our own closure designs and mould technology. The harder part was that we had to scale up print- ing capabilities in parallel. Similar to the decision to automate, we decided to go a bit of a new route by utilising digital printing technology in both our Swiss and US operations. (See article CAPrint page 38) PETplanet: Have you been able to achieve your own targets? Michael Krueger: Of course, coronavirus has also presented us with several challenges. Supporting our customers with technical exper- tise on their bottling or injection lines is part of our business model. It was very hard for a couple of months to just travel to our customer’s sites to do that. In the meantime, we have been able to implement projects both remotely and on site. PETplanet: A bit more about coro- navirus. How has it affected the cap industry overall? Michael Krueger, CEO of Corvaglia Small section of the fully automated cap production