Rigid plastic container and closure manufacturer Pretium Packaging LLC of Chesterfield, Mo., is growing rapidly through an ongoing series of acquisitions and product developments.
Parent company Genstar Capital LLC likes plastics' promise.
“We are pretty bullish on plastic converters such as Pretium,” said David Golde, a director with equity investor Genstar in San Francisco and chairman of the board at Pretium.
Golde noted that consumer product companies are customizing packaging to drive sales and shelf-differentiation for various grocers and retailers.
“Pretium has a strong engineering capability to innovate design,” Golde said in a telephone conference call. “At Genstar, we provide an unparalleled amount of support for where a management team wants to take a business.” Golde focuses on Genstar's industrial and health care verticals.
While withholding numbers, Golde noted: “We are aggressively investing in the business to support growth.”
Paul Kayser joined Pretium as president and CEO in February.
“We are not done buying at all,” Kayser said. “Inside Pretium, we have a team to focus on identifying targets, typically with only a few locations.”
Tim Wehrfritz is Pretium senior vice president for mergers, acquisitions and integration.
Kayser noted that Pretium has a broad portfolio of preform designs and a strong capability to provide innovative solutions to customers for specific applications.
“Over the years, the company was assembled from some great names in the blow molding industry” and operates with a unique culture that aims to maintain local responsiveness as a key element, Kayser said.
“Customers can no longer afford to have large inventories or large transactional commitments,” Kayser said. “A customer wants containers on a specific date at a specific cost” for use in a particular filling location that may be 200 to 600 miles — or across the country — from the relevant Pretium production site.