The Austrian group owns two plants in Romania, one in Rascruci, Cluj County, where it makes EPS for construction use and one in Oradea, where it makes EPS packaging for home appliances and electronics. Customers on this particular segment include Samsung, Webasto and De’Longhi.
“We hope to overshoot the EUR10 million mark this year as we expect a construction industry rebound,” Bogdan Roman, general manager Hirsch Porozell told ZF Transilvania.
The weatherization market will increase because Romania committed to substantially improve energy efficiency of buildings under a EU directive by 2020, Roman said.
Packaging generates about 15% of Hirsch Porozell’s revenue, while the construction industry accounts for the rest. Its main business partners are the traditional resellers of construction materials, the distributors (Arabesque, Masterplast) and the major do-it-yourself retailers (Dedeman, Ambient). The company can now make and deliver about 300,000 square meters of EPS for weatherization use a year, while the packaging unit can process about 400 tons of EPS for packaging.
“We will continue with the same production capacity in 2015 and will use what we have as efficiently as possible. Romania has EPS overproduction capacity.”
The company is currently employing 53 people at its plants in Cluj and Oradea and will hire more this year for the manufacturing operations mainly. It only invested in technology upgrades and storage capacity last year.
Competitors in the EPS business include Austrotherm, AdePlast, Arcon and Masterplast.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)