Manama Packaging Industries has targeted sales of BD10 million ($26.5 million) for 2008 and is optimistic it will be met with new capacity having come on stream.
The company installed facilities to produce rotogravure printed laminates, high-barrier five-layer films for packing oil, films for frozen applications, thermoforming films and bio-plas, a new generation of biodegradable films and bags
It has signed a contract with DHL to supply the courier company with biodegradable films for courier bags.
Under another contract with Jawad it will deliver biodegradable bags for Jawad’s supermarket chain.
Marketing manager Arshad Khan said the company would easily expand production of biodegradable bags if other parties signed up for deliveries. “Our existing machinery for plastic bags can be modified for the purpose,” he said.
The company has plans to expand into new products but would first want to see how it was consolidating on the new facilities, he commented.
Manama Packaging Industries had sales of BD7 million in 2007 and BD6 million in the year before..
Some 65 per cent of production goes overseas, mainly to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states but also as far away as Europe and the Caribbean.
Khan said the company would like to have more customers in Europe and penetrate the US market.
Operating since 1997, the company has deployed German extruders that offer polyethylene films for different lamination applications. In printing, the equipment includes a Spanish eight-colour flexographic central impression press. It has a French-made lamination machine that operates with quality adhesives and offers strong lamination bonds between substrates such as BOPP, metallised BOPP, CPP, nylon, polyester, paper and aluminium foil combinations. Slitting machines provide high-speed conversions. The company is also equipped with high-speed autobag and pouch-making machines.
An in-house laboratory attends to quality control while the company’s R&D division keeps track of the latest trends for developing new products.
Manama Packaging’s products have applications in the food, construction, and agricultural sectors, among other fields.
For the construction industry it specialises in producing detectable and non-detectable warning tapes, red and white warming tapes and underground caution tapes.
And for agriculture it designs and produces agricultural tunnel rolls and greenhouse films.
Raw materials used for production are sourced in Sabic, Qapco, Equate, Exxon Mobil, Gulf Pack, Nova and Flex among other firms. Khan said a challenging aspect was price fluctuations and the large increase in raw material prices stemming from increased oil prices.
The company’s main shareholders are Mohammed Hasan Dawani, Abdul Hameed Darwabi, Mohammed Akram Chaudhry and Mohammed Ejaz Chaudhry.