Sweden’s Plastal (Kungälv; www.plastal.com) is the latest OEM supplier to fall victim to the widening automotive industry crisis. The holding for the group with 6,000 employees in nine European countries – including 1,800 in Germany – filed for insolvency on 5 March 2009. “We have turned over every possible stone in our attempt to avoid this situation, but today our last efforts failed,” president and CEO, Roar Isaksen said in announcing the news.

Initially, the insolvency affects only the Swedish holding; however, Roar said that, due to the high degree of integration, he believes it is “unavoidable” that the operating units also will have to follow. While the decision will be left to the supervisory boards in the respective countries, this seems a foregone conclusion, as all deliveries into the individual plants will be suspended. Customers wanting to take delivery of ordered parts will have to assume freight costs. Plastal supplies many of Europe’s leading car manufacturers and manufactures the bolt-on parts for “Smart.”

A lone bright spot may be that Menzolit Compounds Group (Heidelberg / Germany; www.menzolit.com), which has belonged to Plastal since 2006, may be able to avoid the slide into bankruptcy, technology director Peter Stachel told PIE. He said the outlook should be clearer at the beginning of next week.

The holding, with sales of EUR 1.3 bn in 2008, is majority owned by private equity investor Nordic Capital Fund V. Plastal said the fund made a “substantial capital infusion” into the OEM supplier in January. Since then, however, customer markets have “declined dramatically.” Projected volumes in January and February were 40% below the comparable 2008 level. Efforts to sell non-core businesses and receive emergency cash from the Swedish government did not have the desired effect, Isaksen said.

Plastal nearly doubled its turnover and became one of the largest European suppliers of injection moulded plastics components to the automotive industry with the late 2005 takeover of Dynamit Nobel Kunststoff (Weißenburg / Germany) – see Plasteurope.com of 10.11.2005. The deal included Menzolit.