As expected, Coveris (Chicago, Illinois / USA; www.coveris.com) is to part with its Americas and Rigid segments. This was confirmed by interim CEO Dimitri Panayotopoulos during a telephone conference announcing the third quarter results of the current financial year. He expects the transactions to be completed in Q1 2018. It means that Coveris will, in future, concentrate predominantly on its European businesses.

The plastics packaging group had only recently restructured its activities from two divisions – Flexible (films and film packaging) and Rigid (thermoformed and injection-moulded packaging) – into four new segments, namely Americas, Rigid, EMEA and UK Food & Consumer (see Plasteurope.com of 20.11.2017).

For the Americas segment, the divestment process has already started, while for Rigid, talks are currently under way with the first buyers. As is usual in such cases, no names have been given. Panayotopoulos sees "strong interest" for both businesses. The income from the sales is to be used to cut the long-term debts, which are estimated at around USD 1.5 bn, and to generally improve the company's financial position. Whether there are any plans to make acquisitions for the two remaining divisions is unclear.

For Q3 2017, Coveris reported sales of USD 628m (EUR 535m), compared with USD 620m in the same period of the previous year. The slight increase was, however, almost exclusively due to currency differences. Adjusted EBITDA fell further to USD 71m (Q3 2016: USD 78m), which the management attributes primarily to lower sales volumes and a changed product mix in the US and UK.