Blow molding machine builders in recovery mode

Blow molding machine builders had a better year in 2024 as a stagnant post-pandemic period for processors of packaging and other products seems to be finally met with some investments again.

After a slow 2023, 2024 turned out to be a solid business year with machine sales and shipments returning to more traditional levels at Williamston, Mich.-based Bekum America.

It helps that the machinery supplier to the blow molded packaging market enjoys a wide diversity of end-use applications, said Bekum Vice President of Sales Gary Carr. He said 2024 saw shipments into food and beverage, personal care, household and industrial chemical, automotive lubricants, medical and pharma, industrial packaging and traditional custom blow molding segments.

The year brought a "significant up market" for Uniloy Inc. in Tecumseh, Mich., which started 2024 with an order backlog that had increased 30 percent over 2023, according to Timothy Tomlin, vice president of sales and key accounts.

"The backlog in 2025 is stronger than 2024," he said.

At Kautex Machines Inc. in Flemington, N.J., 2024 was more about returning to a normal mode of business that includes shipping extrusion blow molding systems and attending major trade shows following a restructuring.

Parent company Kautex Maschinenbau System GmbH in Bonn, Germany, has been repositioning itself financially after declaring insolvency in August 2023 and restructuring through a German process known as self-administration.

"Kautex is back after a challenging 2024. We are focused on rebuilding our reputation while looking ahead to next year with cautious optimism," said Manuel Heusinger, vice president of sales and service Americas.

Sales of new machines continue to be a struggle, Heusinger said. He pointed to "market overcapacity, appealing used machine options, and economic uncertainties."

Conversely, Heusinger said, Kautex's service and retrofit business remains stable, and it is expected to close at budgeted levels.

At R&B Plastics Machinery LLC in Saline, Mich., President Fred Piercy said blow molding machinery sales have been soft in 2024.

"We had high interest rates, an election year and a lot of excess capacity. Q1 and Q2 — the first half of the year — was extremely slow. The backlog from the end of '23, basically the order intake, was low, and it wasn't until the third quarter going into the fourth that we're starting to pick up some additional business," Piercy said.

The business is coming from the market for home and industrial containers.

"These aren't your average containers for pump sprays and wipes," Piercy said. "It's more like solvents, paints and chemicals."

The consumer package goods (CPG) sector has been "extremely slow" in terms of expanding capacity and new investments, Piercy added.

"The converters are just maintaining their capabilities to supply their current customers," Piercy said.

Kautex has been focused on industrial packaging applications and specialty products.

"Besides that, we increased our efforts in composite cylinder applications, including many ongoing customer R&D projects in our technical center," Heusinger said. "We are known as a partner for more complex solutions, and this is where we can bring added value to the market."

Uniloy's most active markets are packaging and pharmaceuticals, Tomlin said.

Back in 2020, as the coronavirus spread, machine builders went into overdrive manufacturing the blow molding equipment to produce everything from travel-size hand gels to squeeze bottles and spray bottles to containers for sanitizers, cleaners and home-cooked meals to industrial-size disinfectants and food-grade barrels.

The need was immediate, but then over the next couple years, it dried up.

"From our perspective, the market is recovering," Uniloy's Tomlin said.

In the post-COVID era, officials at Rocheleau Tool & Die Co. Inc. in Fitchburg, Mass., saw a downturn of export business until 2024 brought what President Steven Rocheleau describes as a strong resurgence.

Next year is shaping up to be a good one with more quotes and potential projects for the builder of blow molding machines for volume production of all types of containers.

"Technology in machine connectivity and a global acceptance of virtual meetings has contributed to our ability to support customers around the globe," Rocheleau said.

Kautex's Heusinger said extrusion blow molding machine sales need some nudging these days.

"With a substantial number of new machines installed in 2020 and 2021, and existing machinery continuing to operate at satisfactory levels, machine manufacturers need to be creative and innovative to generate demand in the current environment," Heusinger said.

When processors do invest in blow molding machinery, they are usually adding capacity vs. replacing old machines.

"We believe that companies are hesitating to replace still-functional machines due to high capital costs and economic uncertainty," Heusinger said.

Bekum's Carr put it this way: "Replacement of older, still-running assets remains the most difficult sale in blow molding machinery. 2024 was no different. Very little can be identified as true replacement sales."

At R&B, Piercy said about 60 percent of blow molders his company talks with are going to add capacity and 40 percent are seeking replacements, while Uniloy's Tomlin said their mix is more 70 percent new capacity and 30 percent replacement.

As for the supply chain for machine builders, Bekum's Carr said it seems to have normalized.

Uniloy's Tomlin said some parts and many prices are still a challenge. "Overall pricing has spiked with little relief, and deliveries remain somewhat extended," he added.

At Kautex, Heusinger said: "We have established three major supply chains — America, Europe and Asia — which has enabled us to address previous sourcing challenges, particularly concerning electrical parts."

Bekum officials said it seems the business volatility of the pandemic has worked itself out except for the residual impact on the labor pool, which Carr said has been monumental.

"Manufacturing jobs are extremely difficult to fill and retain in the current labor market and this challenge transcends the entire plastics industry," Carr said.

Bekum looks forward to growth in its machinery building operation, but hiring new talent in the current marketplace is very challenging, especially in the skilled trades area, Carr said.

"The human resource challenge will most likely become our biggest business pacing constraint in our 2025 performance," he added.

Uniloy's Tomlin said initiatives and mandates related to post-consumer recycling present machine builders with new issues to solve, but "hiring talent is always a challenge."

At Kautex, Heusinger said high interest rates have led to the postponement of many projects.

"But we hope that as rates come down, we will see more capital-intensive projects being realized," he added.

The machine builder has open job positions to fill, too.

"We are facing hiring challenges in our service department as we are looking to increase capacity. It remains difficult to find individuals with the right skill set who are also willing to travel," Heusinger said.

At R&B, Piercy gets it. Earlier in his career, he said he took about 250 work-related trips one year. His company manages to avoid that.

"We spread that work around so that one person doesn't have to live on the road," Piercy said.

He also sees some relief on the hiring front.

"There was this ratcheting up of wage costs, and that seems to have plateaued a little bit and there seems to be better access to more talent in the market than there was even a year ago," he said. "We've had a big focus at R&B to make sure that we're replacing our veteran talent. We're here in the Detroit metro area competing against the automotive market, and that has cooled slightly."

While the post-COVID blow molding market has been up and down, Rocheleau said the family-owned company experienced a nice surge following the NPE2024 trade show.

"NPE was a great event for us," he added. "Were able to present a new application on our Model RS90 reciprocating screw blow molder for larger-size containers, including off-center neck production. Blow molding is a niche market, so NPE is a great way for us to make an impression on our customers and prospects to keep us in mind when projects become active."

The K 2025 trade show in Düsseldorf, Germany, will be Bekum's major investment for 2025 following a busy week at NPE in Orlando, Fla., in May 2024.

"The Bekum booth was busy the entire show with visitors representing our long-established customers as well as new prospects," Carr said. "NPE2024 allowed Bekum America to showcase our latest technologies, including live demonstrations and, overall, the lead quality and post-show feedback was positive."

Uniloy presented its solutions-driven strategy.

"We had significant booth traffic with quality visitors," Tomlin said.

Kautex's Heusinger said it was great to be back at the show following a six-year hiatus caused by the cancellation of NPE2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We had many customers and partners visit us, expressing their happiness to see Kautex participating in the event after a challenging 2023 on the Kautex Group level," Heusinger said. "While we initiated new leads and project discussions at NPE, not many of them have materialized yet."

R&B showed an electric shuttle blow molding machine that Piercy said was well received.

"We got an opportunity to show it to the customer base and some people that we wouldn't otherwise maybe have had exposure to, so we found it very beneficial," Piercy said. "It's a large expenditure, but we were happy we did it. We had quite a bit of follow-up and interest out of the show."

At Kautex, following the restructuring of production facilities in Germany and China and the completion of the merger process earlier this year, Heusinger said North American efforts have been focused on stabilizing operations and enhancing service quality.

"We continue expanding our local supply chain and increasing stock levels in New Jersey to ensure faster and greater availability of spare parts across the Americas region," he added.

Kautex will hire field service technicians and a controls engineer for the U.S. service department, Heusinger said.

"Alongside our parent company, we plan to expand Kautex's global manufacturing footprint, which might include adding machine assembly to North America."

R&B machinery is assembled in the U.S., Piercy noted.

At Uniloy, Tomlin said 2024 brought the deal with FGH Systems in Denville, N.J., increased technical laboratory capabilities for training and development, and significant growth in business over prior years.

Uniloy bought the shuttle mold and technical service portions of FGH Systems with plans to integrate its manufacturing assets into Uniloy's existing Fremont, Ohio, and Tecumseh, Mich., facilities, which produce reciprocating, wheel, industrial and shuttle molds.

At a tough time for hiring, Rocheleau managed to bring more employees on board to its Massachusetts facility, where the 86-year-old company has been building extrusion blow molding machinery for the packaging market since the mid-1960s.

"We have added engineering staff to focus on complimentary automation controls — both for internally manufactured components and coordinating with key vendors where we integrate products into our machinery lines," Rocheleau said. "Selling a blow molder is not only about the machinery we build here; it is considering resin-in through bottles-out and everything in between to make that happen. Making sure we have people who can be part of that solution is critical to our long-term success."

Bekum officials have been focused on filling open roles and meeting sustainability demands.

"Our business outlook is positive, and we are hiring in numerous key facets of our business, especially for our U.S. manufacturing team," Carr said. "In addition to our packaging machine line, we have also developed a full line of industrial blow molding that also can be equipped with three-layer technology to meet client's material cost and sustainability goals."

In 2024, Bekum also strengthened its sales efforts, Carr said, by establishing ProPlas in Monterrey, Mexico, as its exclusive independent manufacturer's representative.

Kautex's Heusinger said automation has become increasingly common in the plastics industry, driven primarily by labor shortages, rising labor costs and the need for higher productivity and efficiency.

"At Kautex, we see the biggest demand in automated post-molding operations — deflashing, assembly solutions, smart quality checks, etc. — for large-format parts," Heusinger added.

For Uniloy, processors are seeking robotics and independently operated work cells for production and safety, Tomlin said.

For high-speed blow molding, Bekum's Carr said automation is a necessity.

"As a machinery manufacturer, the key is offering automation solutions that provide application flexibility and changeover-friendliness," Carr said. "This trend will only continue and transcend further into large part blow molding as well."

Machine builders are helping processors integrate artificial intelligence in their operations as the plastics industry takes steps toward Industry 4.0, which technically means fully integrated processes, from order entry to molding, assembly and shipping.

Carr said Bekum's machinery is fully Industry 4.0 capable and more groups are using it.

"Customers are now setting themselves up to use AI in the future with an uptick in groups purchasing Bekum's Industry 4.0 sensor package, which monitors key service usage, such as power, water pressure, flow and temperature, and compressed air pressure," Carr said.

At Kautex, the machine builder has been partnering with selected customers in R&D projects.

"We offer standardized data monitoring packages [DataCap] to make captured data available via OPC UA interfaces, allowing our customers to analyze vast amounts of data — for example, through connected workforce solutions like Redzone," Heusinger said.

OPC UA, or OPC Unified Architecture, is a machine-to-machine communication protocol for exchanging data from sensors to cloud applications developed by the OPC Foundation to enable industrial automation.

"As it remains difficult to find individuals with the right skill set, we need and want to implement more intelligent systems in our machines while paying attention to transparency, data security and simplicity," Heusinger said.

Processors are embracing new technologies initially to monitor machine uptime, efficiency, predictive maintenance and to perform manual adjustments to the process, Bekum's Carr said.

"Looking forward, AI's potential is for collected data from the blow molder, auxiliary equipment and quality systems to be run through data analytics software to make automatic adjustments to complete blow molding process from raw material coming in, to the finished and tested bottle going out," Carr said.

Heusinger sees an uptick in interest and activity.

"While our industry may have initially lagged behind other sectors in adopting Industry 4.0, it has now advanced well beyond the early-adopter phase," he said. "Many medium to large plastics processors have integrated various Industry 4.0 technologies into their operations, with smaller companies beginning to follow suit. Competitive pressure, along with the drive for improved sustainability and efficiency, has been a significant motivating factor."

Currently, Heusinger said, most processors are focused on data collection, machine learning and monitoring for preventive maintenance and root cause analysis to reduce downtime and plan maintenance more effectively.

AI-supported quality control of finished parts is helping to decrease inspection times and enhance accuracy, Heusinger added.

"There are many good algorithms available that help analyze collected data but we, together with our customers and partners, must train them to look at the 'right' data and interpreting results wisely," he said. "There is a growing trend toward generative AI, particularly for analyzing data related to measurements, anomaly detection, logbooks, manually recorded activities and malfunctions. Although it is still emerging, this technology shows great potential for the future."

Processors also are leveraging AI technology for tasks such as optimizing factory floor space, assessing the quality and temperature of raw materials, monitoring machines in real time to optimize production and initiate predictive maintenance, as well as performing quality control on finished parts.

"At Kautex, for instance, we are further developing our digital twin, which we use to simulate our blow molding process, facilitate customer training and conduct virtual machine commissioning," Heusinger said. "Also, we continue to work on real-time analyses of, for example, wall thickness measurements inside the blow molding process, quality check and machine status evaluation to become more proactive instead of reactive."

Technology advancements are enabling more sustainable manufacturing operations.

At Uniloy, Tomlin said, higher output machines use less energy, and processors are investing in them to manufacture lighter-weight products with increased strength-to-weight ratios.

Carr said Bekum's technology offerings with an eye on sustainability includes all-electric machinery for energy savings; bottle lightweighting with closed-loop quality feedback; and extruders developed for higher throughputs and better melt quality with lower overall energy consumption.

Bekum also has new and retrofittable three-layer extrusion systems, Carr said, for processing with maximum post-consumer resin (PCR) loading in the middle layer.

At Kautex, all R&D projects are directly connected to sustainability with a focus on reduction of material usage, creating more material combinations, and improving output and energy consumption while using higher grades of automation to reduce labor cost.

"It starts with getting involved as early as possible in the product definition phase," Heusinger said. "We want to assist our customers to decide on the most competitive packaging solution for their products and the most optimal and cost-efficient way of producing it even though that could mean doing it not in extrusion blow molding."

In the product definition phase, Kautex uses simulation technology with proprietary knowledge and comprehensive total cost of ownership models to compare different scenarios, Heusinger added.

"These are reviewed together with our customers to jointly agree on the best solution to make their project a reality," he said.

Local mandates, ESG (environmental responsibility, social impact and corporate governance) initiatives and public sentiment are playing a role in the trend.

"Consumers are paying more attention to the packaging itself — what material they are made from, how much recycled content they contain and recyclability," Heusinger said. "In general, more packaging regulations are pushing machine manufacturers to further innovate and find solutions to ensure stable production with higher percentages of PCR and new resins."

In the U.S., a wide range of packaging rules are unfolding with inconsistent requirements by states when it comes to post-consumer content, Heusinger said.

To prepare for the changes, "Kautex was one of the pioneers of the R-Cycle project, aiming to create a digital passport for plastic products, enabling its proper valuation when going into the recycling stream," Heusinger said.

Bekum's Carr added, "A general sense of confusion seems to resonate with processors wondering what new policy will impact their business and how to best prepare for the future. The overriding challenge to larger-scale recycling remains the economics of PCR usage. Simply put, recycled materials need to be cost-advantageous over virgin material."

Bekum officials expect to see continued growth in blow molded packaging machinery in 2025 with what Carr calls "emphasis being placed on the effective use of recycled plastics."

Like other executives in the plastics industry, they also are waiting to see what happens when president-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January.

"Presidential elections are often contentious — this one especially so," Carr said. "Nevertheless, we expect business will simply adjust to the political rhythm of the next administration. The discussion of tariffs on foreign-built products coming into the U.S. marketplace is certainly one we are watching closely, as it could help with our U.S. manufacturing competitiveness against low-cost imports."

For Uniloy, Tomlin said next year's markets look "very strong" for packaging, pharmaceutical and industrial. The company is investing in people, processes and equipment for initiatives related to new product development and quality programs as well as website development and e-commerce launch.

Kautex is seeing increased demand in the automotive market for new blow molding equipment to produce CoEx6 fuel tanks and CoEx7 filler pipes.

"This is a positive development for Kautex, as we have been the market and technology leader in this segment for decades," Heusinger said. "In addition, we are see increasing demand for composite cylinder applications."

Sales in this area began to decline significantly in 2019.

"However, in recent months, we have noticed increased interest in new equipment to add capacity. We hope that some of these projects will be realized in the coming months," Heusinger said.

Kautex continues to experience strong demand for modernizing existing equipment, he added.

"Additionally, we are looking toward emerging technologies, such as hydrogen, where we aim to take over a leading role on the machinery in the future," Heusinger said.

Kautex has been in a prototyping and testing phase with selected partners for hydrogen liner applications as an opportunity related to future mobility.

Blow molding processors are looking for flexibility and that need is also driving some investment, Piercy said.

"They want to run a lot of products because the brand owners are constantly changing their designs," he added. "They buy a machine for a certain application, but a year from now they expect to be doing something else. So, we're doing a lot to expand capabilities of the machinery for that ahead of time."

Plastics packaging machinery builders are getting more creative to serve markets, according to Piercy.

"There's still a lot of pressure on plastic packaging, so the CPG companies are constantly looking at alternatives — ways to not only reduce their plastic but [also] incorporate more recycled content. Some of that is change to other containers and other substrates."

Looking to next year, Piercy said: "I believe 2025 is going to be better than 2024 has been, and I believe that it will be probably more robust in the second half. Even though we haven't had a lot of growth in North America, it still remains one of the markets where there is activity, although not as strong as it had been."

Bekum expects 2025 to be a good year as has Uniloy, which has projections "significantly higher than 2024."

At Kautex, Heusinger said he is cautiously optimistic and added, "We expect that more projects will be realized than in 2024."

At Rocheleau, new opportunities were found providing machinery that allows processors to relocate production of larger-size bottles to be nearer to their customers.

"With increased freight cost and attention to reducing carbon footprint, there is certainly savings in shipping larger bottles shorter distances," Rocheleau said. "While many projects are for relocated production or expanded requirements at a current site, there are a number of new applications where product development has turned into production opportunities."

Rocheleau officials are confident in the blow molding market moving into 2025.

"While there are real challenges with interest rates, labor issues, higher cost of production [and] ongoing pressures against plastic, we feel as a company and an industry we are fighting on the correct side of the battle and look forward to being viewed as being part of the solution to address these issues," Rocheleau said.

Blow molding machine builders in recovery mode