Italy’s RadiciGroup, a multinational headquartered near Bergamo with diversified businesses focusing on chemicals, plastics, synthetic fibers and nonwovens and annual sales of EUR 1,011 million, has announced that its Performance Plastics business closed the 2015 financial year with consolidated sales revenue of EUR 277 million. This amounts to a 9% increase over 2014, and a gain of 12% compared to 2013.

These are highly satisfying results for the three-year period 2013-2015, said the company, and, if the figures of the first sixth months of 2016 are anything to go by, the trend seems set to continue. That means, said Luigi Gerolla, CEO of RadiciGroup Performance Plastics, that “during the second half, we expect growth of about 3%.”

The breakdown of RadiciGroup Performance Plastics sales revenue by region for 2015 shows Europe in the lead, with a 54% share (16% Italy / 38% rest of Europe) and 46% sales outside Europe.

RadiciGroup Performance Plastics is planning a 20% increase in worldwide production capacity is planned: in Europe (with special emphasis on Germany), as well as in North America, South America and Asia in the period 2016-2017, Gerolla said. “Globalizing production so as to be close to our international customers and, at the same time, developing local markets continues to be our main industrial strategy.”

This strategy goes hand-in hand with the company’s fundamental R&D work to create new high performance products and ever more customized solutions. “These we develop in collaboration with our customers for any type of specific application,” said Gerolla. “At the K 2016 trade fair, we are going to officially present Radilon Aestus T, a new PPA product line, the latest addition to our family of high-temperature-resistant specialties.”

In 2015, automotive generated about 60% of RadiciGroup Performance Plastics’ sales revenue, with the US, China and Germany performing particularly well.

“The automotive industry,” Maurizio Radici, vice president and COO of RadiciGroup, said, “has been the driving force for this business area, as well as others. It’s the number-one sales market for our Group.”

RadiciGroup supplies the automotive industry with a range of products, including engineering plastics, polyamide and polyester synthetic fibres, and nonwovens. “During the last few months, we’ve had the opportunity to showcase our large product portfolio at the headquarters of car giants like BMW and Jaguar, to mention just a few,” said Radici. “During a series of meetings, we had in-depth technical discussions with these partners, which yielded very useful ideas on products, applications, eco-design and sustainability.” 

He added: “Sustainability is an issue that the automotive industry pays special attention to, and our Group strongly believes in it.”

And in fact, sustainability continues to be one of RadiciGroup’s key innovation drivers. Over 2015, RadiciGroup’s product development strategy continued on three fronts, namely biopolymers, post-industrial and post-consumer recycling, and ecodesign of products obtained from traditional sources. The group also maintained its constant commitment to measure the environmental impact of its products and provide the market and all its stakeholders with information based on scientific, verified and comparable data. To that end, the Group has developed Environmental Product Declarations (EPD)  -  comprehensive, internationally-harmonized reports documenting the ways in which a product, throughout its lifecycle, affects the environment – for a number of its products, including the Heramid range of post-industrial PA6 and PA6.6 engineering plastics, the polyamide scrap recovery service (solely used for the production of Heramid), the Radilon S and Radilon A lines, PA6 and PA6.6 engineering plastics, and for Radifloor PA6 and PA6.6 BCF yarn.