In focus

CPH 2021 Investors’ Day put the spotlight on Packaging

The CPH Group hosted its latest annual Investors’ Day on Monday, 14 June. This year’s event offered an update on the Group’s long-term strategy, along with a more detailed insight into its Packaging Division.

Just under two dozen analysts and investors attended the CPH Group’s 2021 Investors’ Day in Perlen on Monday, 14 June. Group CEO Peter Schildknecht updated the participants on CPH’s three-pronged long-term strategy. “In our internationalization, our expansion of our non-paper businesses and our actions to decrease our dependence on the Swiss franc,” he explained, “the CPH Group is well on track.”

With its internationalization and its focus on high-value products, the Chemistry Division has enjoyed sizeable success. Through its acquisition in China, its realignment of activities at its production sites and its innovative quality products, the division has transformed its annual EBIT margin from a negative value in 2009 into the +6.3% of 2020, and is currently very favourably positioned in competitive terms.

In the Paper Division, the many actions that have been successfully taken over the past few years can be evidenced least. The demand for newsprint has been in structural decline for the past ten years, and paper prices have virtually halved over that period in Swiss franc terms. If the market had remained unchanged from ten years ago, the division would have delivered an EBITDA for 2020 at the level of its current net sales.

The Packaging Division has continued to grow, and is consistently implementing its internationalization strategy with new production plants in China and Brazil. Here, too, the focus on high-value products – i.e. packaging films with high-barrier properties – has reaped its rewards, as has the division’s fast innovative pace. The past ten years have seen net annual sales raised by some 60%, and the annual EBIT margin has improved from the breakeven level of 2009 to last year’s +13.3%.

Wolfgang Grimm, Head of Packaging, sees more strategic development ahead. “To meet the demands of the circular economy, what will be needed in future are not the present blister packagings made of multiple materials such as PVC and aluminium, but mono-material products,” he says. Various development projects to this end are already underway at Perlen Packaging.

Further details can be found in the 2021 Investors’ Day presentations of the CPH Group and Perlen Packaging.