Smurfit Kappa Group today announced results for the 3 months and 12 months ending 31 December 2015. Pre-tax profits rose to €599m from €378m while its annual revenues were flat at €8.109 billion.

On the back of such strong Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results shares rose sharply to reach €20.75 at 14:40 from €18.23 at close yesterday.

Smurfit, who have in the region of 45,000 employees globally, boast in today’s results of being No. 1 in both corrugated cardboard and recycled containerboard in Europe. In addition to such strong trading in Europe Smurfit continue to make significant inroads into the America’s with 7 significant acquisitions in Latin America since 2013.

Tony Smurfit, Smurfit Kappa CEO, commented: “We are pleased to report a strong 2015 outcome delivering significant improvement across all key financial and operating metrics. We will continue to drive our performance by focusing on marketing and innovation initiatives for our customers, cost efficiency and financial discipline.”

“We invested over €380 million in acquisitions in 2015 to strengthen and diversify our geographic reach and drive earnings. During the year we invested €450 million to optimise the asset quality in our system and our investments in high return capital investment projects are now also delivering incremental EBITDA growth. We are continually enhancing the breadth and depth of our service offering for customers, while consistently lowering operating costs through our supply chain.

Source; www.businessworld.ie