As part of the strategic realignment with a focus on the beverage industry, SIG Holding AG (CH-8212 Neuhausen; www.sig.biz) divested PKL Flexible Verpackungen GmbH (D-5244 Linnich; www.pkl.de) and SIG Steward Systems (Plano, Texas / USA), effective 1 July 2003. With 175 employees and annual sales of EUR 34m, PKL specialises in the production of flexible packaging materials and technical paper for dry goods. The company was taken over by Sopal, a subsidiary of Groupe Gascogne SA (F-40993 Saint Paul- des-Dax Cedex; www.groupe-gascogne.fr) while Steward Systems was purchased by UCA Group (Chicago; www.ucagroup.com).

The SIG group has now officially stated that it is also “looking for solutions outside of the corporation” for the machine engineering companies SIG Blowtec GmbH & Co KG (D- 53842 Troisdorf; www.sigblowtec.de), SIG Kautex GmbH & Co KG (D-53229 Bonn; www.sigkautex.com), SIG Hamba Filtec (D-66539 Neunkirchen; www.sighamba.de) as well as for SIG Pack (www.sigpack.com). SIG reported that talks with potential partners will go ahead within the next months.

In future, the corporation will focus on its core business of SIG Combibloc (www.combibloc.com) and SIG Beverages (www.sigbeverages.com). These two divisions already represent 80% of corporate sales. In the first half of 2003, these segments posted incoming orders of EUR 749m (previous year: EUR 732m) and sales of EUR 758m (EUR 705m). Pretax profit is expected to dip slightly below that of the previous year.