Earnings at Paul Coulson’s Ardagh Group rose 15.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year, driven by a strong performance by its Americas beverage cans business and an African acquisition, even as the business dealt with rising energy and raw material costs and a strengthening dollar.
Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) for the group increased to $375 million (€368.8 million) from $325 million for the same period last year. Ardagh Group’s 75 per cent-owned beverage cans division, Ardagh Metal Packaging, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Mr Coulson, who over less than 2½ decades turned Ardagh from being the owner of the Irish Glass Bottle Company in Dublin into one of the world’s largest metal and glass packaging groups, effectively controls about 33 per cent of the entire business which now generates about $10 billion in annual sales.
Group sales jumped to $2.49 billion in the second quarter from $1.87 billion, with each of the group’s four segments reporting an increase.
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Ebitda at Ardagh Metal Packaging’s Americas operation jumped 36 per cent to $120 million on the back of a large investment programme in this high-growth division and as it managed to push on rising costs to customers.
However, earnings at Ardagh Metal Packaging Europe declined by 28 per cent to $61 million, mainly as a result of negative currency translation effects and input cost inflation.
One euro was worth $1.14 at the end of last year, but had fallen in value to $1.05 by the end of June.
Ebitda in the Ardagh Glass Packaging Europe & Africa rose almost 30 per cent to $148 million, boosted by the closure during the quarter of its $1 billion purchase of South African glass business Consol. Earnings dropped 13 per cent to $46 million at Ardagh Glass Packaging North America.
The US-listed Ardagh Metal Packaging, led by chief executive Oliver Graham, forecast on Thursday that its beverage can shipments will rise by a “high-single digit” percentage for the full year, with adjusted ebitda on track to amount to $710 million. The corresponding figure for last year was $662 million.
Meanwhile, Ardagh Group was awarded $84 million earlier this month by an arbitration court to settle a case with French industrial group Saint-Gobain.
The award from the International Court of Arbitration stemmed from a patent dispute involving a business the glass and metal containers group acquired from Saint-Gobain eight years ago.
A Delaware jury ordered in April 2017 that Ardagh pay $50.3 million to a company, Green Mountain, which claimed the group’s US glass unit had infringed a patent over technology to turn mixed-colour glass into recycled glass of a single colour.
The affected Ardagh business had been acquired in 2014 as part of the group’s $1.5 billion purchase of Verallia North America (VNA) from Saint-Gobain.
