Rexam Plastics sell Petainer for £16m
packagingnews.co.uk reported today:
Rexam's restructure of its plastics packaging business has continued this morning with the £16m sale of PET drinks packaging business Petainer to private equity buyers.
Next Wave Ventures, WHEB Ventures and senior management have bought Petainer UK Holdings, a leading producer in Germany for reusable PET bottles and in Scandinavia for PET beverage containers.
The buyers of the business, which reported pre-tax profit of £5m in the first half of the year, said that they would aim to expand Petainer into the growth markets of central and Eastern Europe.
Rexam, meanwhile, said that it would take an exceptional loss on the deal of £9m but that the net proceeds would be used to pay down debt. Petainer was first put up for sale in 2006.
Petainer is based in Lidköping, Sweden and runs a second plant in Aš in the Czech Republic. It also has a sales office in Germany and supplies PET bottles, pre-forms and kegs to a number of global drinks companies.
Its key new product is a PET keg which launched in September this year and is designed to be a less energy- and cost-intensive alternative to the traditional metal keg due to its lighter weight and recyclability, which, the company believes, frees breweries of the need to manage large stocks of returnable metal kegs.
Nigel Pritchard has been appointed as group chief executive of Petainer in an otherwise mostly unchanged management team.
He said: "This acquisition is a very exciting opportunity to build on the company's reputation for operational and service excellence.
"Our future growth strategy is based on investing in innovation and new product and service development and in providing the continuous development and excellence that our customers have come to expect."
The sale is the latest in a series of moves by Rexam to restructure parts of its plastics businesses. It has recently announced the planned closures of two plastics packaging sites in the US, while earlier this year it made redundancies at two of its French cosmetics packaging sites and closed a thermoforming site on Deeside.
Rexam was advised on the deal by Poyry Capital, while Next Wave Ventures and WHEB Ventures were advised by Blackwood Capital.
