Innovia restructures its focus towards BOPP films
Earlier this year Innovia announced the sale of its cellulose films business. Now three months later with the deal closed, the company is refocusing its strategy clearly upon building and strengthening its specialty biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) films business.
It is concentrating its efforts into primary global core markets – high performance advanced polymer solutions for labels, packaging, tobacco, and security films. Internally, Innovia is restructuring to ensure that its BOPP focus is fully aligned throughout the business, people, service and systems.
Joe Piccione, managing director, Innovia Films, said: “Separating a business that has grown over 80-plus years is a challenge in itself. Achieving that in such a short time frame is commendable to all those involved in that process. We are exceptionally pleased with the outcome of this process for our cellulose film employees and customers.
“We have always been a specialty films business which represents over 80 per cent of our sales. In addition to our unique and bespoke bubble extrusion process, one of our core strengths is surface engineering. We are experts in tailoring films to our customers’ requirements whether that is barrier, thickness, printability, shrink tightening, squeezability or fast sealing films for optimised performance. Moving forward, we are well invested and will therefore be looking closely at how we can build upon our manufacturing capabilities and in maximising our R&D and technical expertise. This will be done to continuously deliver new and exciting product solutions to our existing and new customers. Having divested of our cellulose film business provides us clear focus on strategically growing our BOPP business.
“In order to effectively split out the cellulose film business, some employees from our shared services areas (sales, accounting, marketing, customer services, IT etc.) have transitioned to new owners. This has provided us with an ideal opportunity to re-evaluate our organisational structure in line with our strategy, to ensure that we augment, reinforce and improve these and other key service functions.”