Essel Propack to set up beauty packaging facility in Poland
15th market having unveiled plans to open up a beauty packaging
production facility in Poland that will serve growing demand for
plastic tubes in the region.
The plant will market the plastic tubes under the Arista Tubes, UK, brand. Arista is currently the leading manufacturer of plastic tubes for the beauty business, in the UK.
The company is also planning to expand the brand into the US market, where it is also opening a production facility in Danville, Virginia, by the end of this year.
The Polish facility will be based in Lódz, west of the country's capital, Warsaw. The city is home to a number of major packaging providers to the cosmetics industry, including a facility that make Gillette razors, blades and associated packaging, as well as a newly opened Rexam beauty packaging facility.
With a total investment estimated at $23m, the facility is expected to be up and running by March 2007, when it will be supplying growing demand in Poland, currently the region's largest market for plastic tubes, together with Central and Eastern European markets and elsewhere in Europe.
The company said that the new facility would be funded partly through debt and partly through operating leases.
The move is part of the company's aim to attain total global coverage by the year 2010 and to be supplying 20 per cent of the total market for plastic tubes.
The company has a targeted and focused expansion plan, which means that the Poland plant will be the company's 25th and the fourth newly-built facility in the past two years.
"Our strategic intent, as we have expressed earlier, is to focus our energies on Europe for enhanced growth," said Ashok Goel, managing director of Essel Propack.
"Moreover, plastic tubes is the path we have chosen for inducing this growth," he said, adding that he expected that the new facility would form an integral part of this ambition in the Central and Eastern European markets and particularly in Poland where market growth is currently outstripping other countries in Europe.
Essel Propack currently claims to be the largest manufacturer of seamless tubes in the world. It supplies the cosmetics, personal care and oral care categories and has recently branched out into the medical care segment.
