Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501270034
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Chesapeake Packaging Co. and Packaging Corporation of America also boxed up good profits in 1994.
"If you didn't make money last year, you need to be in another business," said Donald Woodward, Packaging Corporation's general manager.
Woodward's company employs 26 people at a 50,000-square-foot corrugated-box plant in a Southeast Roanoke industrial park. It is one of 55 plants operated nationwide by Evanston, Ill.-based Packaging Corporation.
The plant is increasing employment and is now looking for printing press operators at a starting salary of $7 an hour, which can climb to roughly $9 an hour within four months.
Like Corrugated Container, Packaging Corporation's Roanoke plant makes specialized boxes from sheets of corrugated board that it gets from outside sources, primarily from the company's own paper mills.
As with other box makers, Woodward said his plant's profits were not as good as they could have been because of increases in the cost of paper.
The cost of paper used to make corrugated boxes went up about 70 percent last year, said Ed Godsey, president and general manger of the Chesapeake Corp.'s Roanoke packaging division.
The increased price can be attributed to production stoppages at some U.S. paper mills and to a strong export market for liner board, the kind of paperboard used to make corrugated boxes. "It's forced a lot of tonnage offshore," Godsey said.
Chesapeake Corp., headquartered in Richmond, owns 10 brown-box plants, including the Roanoke plant on Kyle Avenue Northeast where 198 people are employed. The plant makes its own corrugated board as well, and turns the board into boxes.
The company just completed a 25,000-square-foot addition in December, bringing total floor space at the plant to nearly 200,000 square feet.
Chesapeake also recently began exporting tobacco cartons - large two-piece boxes used to ship raw tobacco - to Brazil for the British-American Tobacco Co., Godsey said. The company is not only excited about that business but sees some additional opportunities opening up in South America, he said.
The export of the tobacco boxes is the plant's first foreign venture. "It's been exciting," Godsey said. "We've had to learn a lot about doing business in a different culture."
Chesapeake sells its products in a volume market. Among its regional customers are Elizabeth Arden, Home Shopping Network, Bassett Furniture and Singer Furniture.
by CNB