Billerudkorsnas venture announces equity investment in Kezzler

/

by Alex

– Industrial investment comes at a time when regulatory demands and market needs for individual packaging is gaining significant traction –

Oslo, Norway – October 12, 2016 — Kezzler AS, a leader in serialization business services, today announced they have completed an agreement with BillerudKorsnäs Venture, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BillerudKorsnäs AB (STO: BILL), of an equity investment with Kezzler.  The new capital will be used to scale Kezzler’s organization in the United States, Europe, and Asia. As part of the investment, Mr. Anders Persson, managing director of BillerudKorsnäs Venture will join Kezzler’s board of directors.

“During the last several months, we have worked very hard to find the right industrial investor and we believe BillerudKorsnäs is an excellent strategic fit,” said Thomas Körmendi, CEO of Kezzler. ”Our company is entering a high growth stage and we continue to partner with industrial investors and global innovative packaging companies. There is tremendous pressure on food and beverage and pharmaceutical brands to serialize their products and we believe we have the most cost-effective and secure item level product identification at mass volumes in real-time.”

BillerudKorsnäs is challenging conventional packaging for a sustainable future and has a clear strategy in which a portion of growth will be generated through new sales and solutions further along the packaging value chain. As part of this, BillerudKorsnäs Venture AB was established in the spring with tasks including finding and investing in early stage companies. The aim is to work closely and actively together with these companies to develop new packaging related solutions. Digitalised packaging, also referred to as ‘The Internet of Packaging’, is one of the areas that the business is focusing on and the investment in Kezzler is a first important step in this direction.

“Kezzler is a pioneer in its field, with a technology that enables packaging to be assigned unique codes at the individual product level for identification at mass scale. We believe Kezzler’s technology is highly interesting for packaging for food and other consumer goods where traceability and authenticity is important; it also offers a new channel for real time consumer interaction. This area of development is of strategic interest to us,” said Anders Persson, managing director of BillerudKorsnäs Venture.

About BillerudKorsnäs

BillerudKorsnäs provides packaging materials and solutions that challenge conventional packaging for a sustainable future. They are a world-leading provider of primary fibre-based packaging materials and have customers in over 100 countries. The company has 8 production units in Sweden, Finland and the UK and about 4,200 employees in over 13 countries. BillerudKorsnäs has an annual turnover of about SEK 22 billion and is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. www.billerudkorsnas.com