Amcor has made what it calls a strategic investment in EPac, the digital-only flexible packaging producer, which will enable the expanding group to open additional sites.
The investment in exchange of a minority shareholding in the young business is put at $10-15 million. Further investment in future is not ruled out.
EPac has sales around $100 million from sites in the US, Canada, UK and Indonesia. It is also opening a site in Ghana and during 2020 announced plans for additional sites in Wroclaw in Poland and Lyon in France. There are 18 sites in operation and five under development.
There was also an order in 2020 for a further batch of HP Indigo presses, this amounting to 26 of the Indigo 25k, to give the company 76 digital presses in all. Each site has two or three presses with a laminator and pouch making machine.
The market is start up business wanting smaller volumes than the minimum order quantities that traditional suppliers like Amcor can cope with. These include food businesses, cannabis products, pet foods and lifestyle products. A key aspect is speed of turnaround, far quicker than the established providers can cope with. There is also an appeal for larger brands wanting to test the market for new products and to cope with proliferation of skus without increasing costs.
Amcor CEO Ron Delia says: “We are incredibly proud of Amcor’s innovation and R&D capabilities but with our scale and global footprint we are also uniquely positioned to supplement our internal efforts with investments in complementary technologies and business models. Our investment in EPac is the first corporate venture type investment for Amcor and provides a great opportunity to learn from a high growth start up.”
EPac was formed less than a decade ago with its first site opened in 2016, by Jack Knott, CEO Virag Patel and Carl Joachim.
By comparison Amcor generates sales of $12.5 billion from 230 sites and 47,000 employees. Its executive vice president of strategy development Ian Wilson says: “This is an exciting opportunity for both companies to benefit from the combination of innovative technologies and business models and the deep expertise of the industry leader. We look forward to working with the EPac team and exploring opportunities to further extend this partnership in the future.”
