2024 Capital Expenditure Ranking

Plastics News articles are full of great information about expansions at plastics processors, but do they indicate any trends to help explain how much companies are investing in new equipment and buildings?

For each of our six processor rankings, we ask for the number of plants and processing equipment used. Some data changes are for new or newly acquired plants. Even newly applicable locations to related processes due to reorganizations.

For the rankings, equipment purchases can pose a foggy area. Are they replacements or additions? Are they improvements to capacity or productivity? It takes good reporting to know to ask.

I wanted to look at which companies are investing in production in order to provide insights into growth trends for each of our rankings, and eventually to compare forecast capital spending with reported results.

I tracked down capital expenditure figures for 17 plastics processors. These are publicly held firms whose sales are derived primarily from plastics. These companies have combined annual sales of about $90 billion.

The sources are consistent year over year, making the percent change the targeted ranked result here, rather than the specific dollar amount.

This initial report sets the baseline from which we can compare the 2024 fiscal results with updated production figures for next year’s rankings.

As a data project, it’s a one-stop chart to both compare industry related players spending and track changes over time.

The total spend for this group was $5 billion, up 3.3 percent over the previous year. That’s about 6 percent of their total annual sales. That should translate into similar gains in plants and equipment counts in next year's rankings of 2024 fiscal year production data.

Plus or minus 20 percent peaks the bell curve for changes in spending, with $280 million as the average spend.

The highest dollar gain in spending was $83.1 million by conduit maker, Atkore Inc.

All Access subscribers can download this chart and MS Excel data file from our Data Center.

We should be able to look back at changes in share pricing of the publicly held companies, to see if there is a correlation to capital investment. These trend lines may match up. Comparing the first seven months of the year, from Jan. 2 to July 31, this chart looks at last year’s spend and it’s possible link to share price in the direct months following improvements.

The highest share price goes to Advanced Drainage Systems Inc. at $177.04, the biggest change goes to Greystone Logistics Inc. at just over a 50 percent gain.

Anyone familiar with our rankings knows our footnotes generally call out mergers and acquisition news or name changes.

And a lot of research would be needed to follow every change included in the dataset, however, spending on capital expenditures can be an indicator of plants, property or equipment purchases. Just as resin pricing and recycled material volumes indicate the impact of raw materials on results. Together they augment our understanding of what's happening in the industry with data to stay informed.

We include plant locations with the extended ranking data in our downloads for All-Access subscribers.

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