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TWST: It is often helpful to start out the interview with an overview of the company. Could you quickly brief us on Hutamaki Oyj (HUH1V.HE)?

Mr. Peltola: Hutamaki is a Finland based packaging company operating on a global scale. We specialize in a certain type of packaging and we’re a world leading operator in a couple of segments: rigid thin-walled plastic, paper packaging and molded fiber packaging. We are also one of the front runners in flexible packaging. We operate on a global scale; we have roughly 16,000 employees in 35 countries. Basically we are in every corner of the world. We have two kinds of customers, first, the consumer goods manufacturers where we supply the packaging and second, food service operators where we supply the service food packaging. Our sales last year were around 2.4 billion Euros. We are relatively new as a packaging company because the company has gone through a transformation from a Finnish conglomerate to an internationally operated consumer goods company to a packaging company. In the last three years we have been in a consolidation phase after a number of divestments and acquisitions. We have been focused on taking the opportunities out of these acquisitions and making our network of companies streamlined and competitive. We are now moving into a new phase where all this streamlining is behind us and we’re fully focused on building our future and working closely with our customers. We have strengthened ourselves in many ways during these years of consolidation. Our main focus was to make our manufacturing structure very competitive. And secondly, we have invested R & D and new product development. I believe we can provide usable packaging systems to our customers and our corporate purpose is to help our customers sell more. Packaging is an important component in their marketing concept and we believe we can help our customers in that respect.

TWST: Will you touch base on your current competitive landscape and any key advantages you think your company possesses over these competitors?

Mr. Peltola: I think the key driver behind building this global network of specialized packaging companies is that our customer base moved from local sourcing of packaging to global sourcing or at least regional. We have currently a couple of the leading consumer goods companies as customers and most of them make at least European or American wide supply contracts with their customers. In our business there is nobody else who has a global network in the businesses where we have a leading position. So we believe that we have a unique business to service these companies. The second thing or cornerstone in our strategy is more often our customers want to use packaging as a tool of differentiation and those companies that can provide good and innovative solutions are the winners. And we believe that all the specialization we have done, all the networking we have done and all the investments we have put into product development will help our customers turn to us for new solutions, new differentiation and so on. So we believe we are in a unique situation to benefit from these trends our customers have been moving towards. That’s why our belief is that this is the way it is going to go -- more and more consolidation is going to take place in our industry. And we have been one of the first companies to really build a global position -- a big benefit for us.

TWST: Where do you see your company in 5 years and does anything economically and or globally have to happen for this to occur?

Mr. Peltola: I believe that in our industry the consolidation will move forward. Companies that are not able to respond to their globalization challenges or their customers or suppliers are not the winners and this is leading to more consolidation. We believe we are one of those consolidators in the future, and are to be able to even further strengthen our global position.