FDBusiness.com

Earlier this year Innovia announced the sale of its cellulose films business.  Now three months later with the deal closed, Innovia is refocusing its strategy clearly upon building and strengthening its specialty biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) films business.  They are concentrating their 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 their BOPP focus is fully aligned throughout the business, people, service and systems.

Joe Piccione, Managing Director, Innovia Films states “Separating a business that has grown over 80+ 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.”

He continued “We have always been a specialty films business which represents over 80% 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 maximizing 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. “

Piccione added “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 the 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.”