Packaging solutions provider Ball has reported net sales of $2.91bn in the third quarter of 2017, compared to $2.75bn for the same period last year.
The company has attributed the growth to strong demand for cans in Latin America. Worldwide, the US-based company had seen an increase of 2% in its can volumes.
Sales increased 33.6% to $425m in its South American beverage packaging unit, compared to $318m reported in Q3 2016.
Ball’s Beverage Packaging Unit in North and Central America saw their sales stay flat at $1.08bn despite what it says was a steep decline in the demand for beer in the US during the month of September.
However, the company made up for that with Mexican beer imports growing continuously along with the demand for differentiated specialty can sizes for packaging carbonated soft drinks and other non-alcoholic beverages.
Ball’s beverage packaging unit in Europe had made revenue of $651m in Q3 2017 compared to $624m that was reported in the same period last year.
On the Food and Aerosol Packaging front, the company’s revenue dropped to $321m in Q3 2017 compared to $329m in Q3 2016.
In the Aerospace segment, Ball’s Q3 2017 revenue has been reported at $241m which is an increase from the $204m it made in the same period last year.
For the first nine months of 2017, Ball reported revenue of $8.24bn compared to $6.54bn it made for the first nine months of 2016.
Ball chairman, president and CEO John Hayes said: “Our European and South American beverage businesses continued their improved performance, and we continue to make progress on our global finance transformation projects and corporate cost-out initiatives with the opening of shared service centers in Belgrade, Serbia, and Querétaro, Mexico.
“These multi-year activities, coupled with normalized operating conditions in our Beverage Packaging, North and Central America segment, planned 2018 beverage manufacturing plant network optimizations, new U.S. and Spain specialty beverage can plants and continuing aerospace and aerosol growth, provide a bridge to our long-standing financial goals of $2 billion of comparable EBITDA and in excess of $1 billion of free cash flow by 2019.”