Tapes, Bags and Coatings
Our tapes, bags and coatings division manufactures and sells tape, adhesive, corrosion protective and PE-based film products to a diverse base of customers around the world. We offer a broad product portfolio of key product groups to a wide range of global end markets that include corrosion protection, HVAC, building and construction, industrial, retail, DIY, automotive, medical and aerospace. Our principal products include heat shrinkable and PE-based tape coatings, PE coated cloth tapes, splicing/laminating tapes, flame-retardant tapes, vinyl-coated tapes, trash bags, drop cloths, plastic sheeting and a variety of other specialty tapes, including carton sealing, masking, mounting and OEM medical tapes. We specialize in manufacturing laminated and coated products for a diverse range of applications, including flexible packaging, products for housing construction and woven polypropylene flexible intermediate bulk containers. We use a wide range of substrates and basic weights of paper, film, foil and woven and non-woven fabrics to service the residential building, industrial, food packaging, healthcare and military markets. Our primary competitors include Intertape Polymers, 3-M, ShurTape, Canusa, Denso, Cadillac, Coated Excellence, FortaFiber, PolyAmerica, Clorox and Reynolds/Pactiv.
Our Strengths
We believe our consistent financial performance is the direct result of the following competitive strengths:
Leading market positions across a broad product offering. One of our key business strategies is to be a market leader in each of our product lines. Through quality manufacturing, innovation in product design, a focus on customer service and a skilled and dedicated workforce, we have achieved leading competitive positions in many of our major product lines, including thinwall, pry-off, dairy and clear polypropylene containers; drink cups; spice and pharmaceutical bottles and prescription vials; spirits, continuous thread, and pharmaceutical closures; aerosol overcaps and plastic squeeze tubes; stretch films; and cloth and foil tape products and adhesives. We believe that our leading market positions enable us to attract and expand our business with blue chip customers, cross-sell products, launch new products and maintain high margins.
Large, diverse and stable customer base. We sell our packaging solutions to over 13,000 customers, ranging from large multinational corporations to small local businesses in diverse industries. Our customers are principally engaged in industries that are considered to be generally less sensitive to changing economic conditions, including pharmaceuticals, food, dairy, and health and beauty. Our top 10 customers represented approximately 20% of our fiscal 2010 net sales with no customer accounting for more than 3% of our fiscal 2010 net sales. Our co-design capabilities and proactive approach to customer service make us an integral part of our customers’ long-term marketing and packaging decisions. The average length of our relationship with our top 10 customers is over 18 years.
Strong organic growth through continued focus on best-in-class technology and innovation. We believe that our manufacturing technology and expertise are best-in-class and that we are a leader in new product innovation, as evidenced by our offering of an extensive proprietary product line of value-added plastic packaging in North America. We currently own proprietary molds and have pioneered a variety of production processes such as what we believe to be the world’s largest deep draw PP thermoforming system for drink cups. We focus our research and development efforts on high value-added products that offer unique performance characteristics and provide opportunities to achieve premium pricing and further enhance our strategic position with our customers. Our dedicated professionals work collaboratively with our customers’ marketing departments in identifying and delivering new package designs.
Scale and low-cost operations drive profitability. We are one of the largest domestic manufacturers and suppliers of plastic packaging solutions and we believe we are one of the lowest-cost manufacturers in the industry. We believe that our proprietary tools and technologies, low-cost manufacturing capabilities and operating and purchasing scale provide us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Our large, high-volume equipment and flexible, cross-facility manufacturing capabilities result in lower unit-production costs