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TWST: In order to begin the interview, could you give a brief overview of Curtis 1000 Europe (CEUG.BE) - including its core markets and some of its key historic milestones?

Mr. Hafner: Curtis 1000 Europe was formed in 1983. It was started as a joint venture between the American partner, Curtis 1000 Inc., U.S.A., and myself so that means we are a German-American joint venture. The reason to form the joint venture in 1983 was to enter into the European Tyvek® market. Curtis 1000 at that time was one of the key players in the Tyvek® market in the U.S. They delivered goods to Europe and at that time the dollar was extremely strong in Europe, so there was no way to export it from the U.S. on a profitable basis. That is the reason why we formed the joint venture and started manufacturing Tyvek® here in Europe. Curtis developed extremely well. We made some acquisitions in the late 80s and early 90s. We acquired some envelope companies including one of our former competitors, Envelopes International Ltd. in England, and a German envelope manufacturer. We also acquired some trading companies in England, Netherlands, France and Germany. So from the very beginning, Curtis became a European player in a lot of different European countries. Currently, Curtis is a niche player but still a market leader in the Tyvek® market. We also offer a large amount of different flexible packaging coming from the envelope side. Today Curtis is also a niche player with some commodity products that are quite necessary when offering a big range of products - especially for the catalog people like Viking, Cascade, Corporate Express and others. Currently, we have annual revenues of roughly $80 million Euros or dollars- it is quite similar. We have been operating in various countries. We have five manufacturing sites - Germany is our main site, another in East Germany where we are doing dust [vacuum cleaner] bags. Due to that fact that Germany became extremely expensive for manufacturing, we formed a company in Poland more than 10 years ago and today we are manufacturing nearly 90 percent of our commodities in Poland. We have a special plant for manufacturing Tyvek® in Luxembourg next door to DuPont. DuPont only manufactures Tyvek®. We set up the plant over 11 years ago and sell it from there all over Europe. We have another plant in England that, as I mentioned, was obtained through an acquisition made a couple of years ago to manufacture envelopes and to enter the UK market. We have some trading organizations in the Netherlands and also some service companies in the Netherlands that we acquired a couple of years ago, which provides fulfillment for our packaging company. In France, we became one of the key suppliers to the French Post. In terms of Tyvek®, the French Post is very popular and very strong in selling pre-stamped Tyvek® envelopes to the end-user.

TWST: What are some of the more significant moves Curtis has made over the last few years?

Mr. Hafner: One of the strongest moves is that we went public on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 1998 and we used the money from our shareholders to do more acquisitions and to continue to grow the company. We grew from roughly $60 million dollars to $80 million in roughly three years.

TWST: Five years down the road, where do you envision Curtis 1000 Europe?

Mr. Hafner: After a period of consolidation, which we started some time last year and we expect to be complete by next year depending on the overall economy, we are certainly going to introduce some new product lines as well as the padded mailers and other items, like flexible packaging. We are also going to make some different acquisitions. So I would say that in five years, the shares of Curtis should be at minimum doubled and certainly much more profitable. As past acquisitions payoff, we will certainly be stronger and be able to get into other areas where we are rather weak at the moment - like Southern Europe and Scandinavia.