Dear Readers,

The year 2021 is drawing to a close - and again we can say: it was an extraordinary and at the same time difficult year. The pandemic event strongly influenced the demand behaviour of our customers. The situation in international sea freight traffic presented our container shipments with unprecedented challenges. Energy prices rose steadily, PVdC became more expensive, the supply situation on the raw material markets was extremely tight and, contrary to all forecasts, the procurement prices for PVC climbed from month to month to a new all-time high.

However, one thing did not change in 2021: the security of supply for our customers always remained our top priority. 

Especially in such turbulent times, the opinion of our customers is very important to us, and so this year we again asked our clientele around the globe for their opinion in order to define focus points on which we can continue to work. To thank our customers for their feedback, we made a small contribution to the climate and planted 500 trees. Two areas of interest clearly emerged from the customer survey: Sustainability & Innovation.

Read in this newsletter what we have done in the 2nd half of the year in these topics and what else you can expect from Perlen Packaging in the future regarding sustainable blister solutions. Our online customer workshops in September on the topics of sustainability & innovative product solutions were consequently very well attended.

We are pleased that we managed to participate in at least 5 trade fairs again this year. Nothing replaces the personal and direct exchange with our customers about their projects and their needs. This gave us the opportunity to provide first-hand information about our innovations in the ultra-high barrier product family. We were particularly pleased to show our customers the first demonstration samples of the upcoming addition to our PERLALUX® product family: our PVC MonoBlister and our Polypropylene (PP) in 300µ.

A New Year 2022 with many interesting projects lies ahead. Expect information about the further automation and modernisation of our plants in Müllheim & Perlen. In addition, in the next issue you will learn more about the start of our local coating plant in Anápolis, Brazil and the next development steps in the context of sustainable product innovations.

We look forward to supporting you in the coming year with your ideas, developments and projects around pharmaceutical films with a lot of commitment. If you don't do it already: please follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date together with us!

Stay healthy and take care of yourself and your colleagues!

With best thanks for the cooperation in 2021 and best wishes for a good, healthy and successful 2022.

Sincerely,

Lars Kirchhoff