Sealed Air Corporation acquired Diversey one year ago and new president and chief operating officer Jerome Peribere, who will take up the title of CEO in 2013, has been tasked with integrating the two multi-billion-dollar businesses.
Here, he tells Hotelier Middle East the company’s growth strategy and priorities for the next 12 months
Jerome Peribere has been president and chief operating officer of Sealed Air Corporation since August 2012, during which time a core part of his role has focused on the integration of Diversey within Sealed Air, following its acquisition in 2011.
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Next year, he will lead the US $8 billion company as CEO, with his goals being to complete the integration and engage his 26,000 employees with the future of the company.
On a recent visit to Dubai, Peribere, along with Somer Gundogdu, VP — MENA, Diversey Gulf FZE, revealed the firm’s growth projections — and outlined why the Middle East hospitality industry would be a market of particular importance.
Can you sum up Sealed AIR’s core products and their benefits to the hospitality business?
Jerome Peribere: First of all, Sealed Air is an $8 billion company that has three divisions. One is a division that does protective packaging, the second one does food and beverage and the third division does institutional and laundry.
Our acquisition of Diversey, which closed on October 1 of last year, has been transformational in the sense it definitely moves the needle for Sealed Air in terms of size from a $4.5 billion to an $8 billion company, that’s one.
And secondly, Sealed Air was very strong in food packaging but now we are really becoming the leader in food and beverage in terms of our ability to have a completely exhaustive offering in food safety.
So imagine the whole food safety chain; we are intervening throughout that food chain — in the slaughterhouse by ensuring total safety in operations there with sanitation of the plant, to equipment for packaging the meat, so the machineries, to the films to end up in a safe packaging.
We are intervening in all of those places. And this is now the link with the institutional and laundry business that Diversey had, which is very important and which is extremely important for Sealed Air in the GCC countries because this is, by the way, our lead business.
We have in the Middle East more than 700 people because we are all about technology and knowledge transfer — we teach hotels and restaurants how to have a much more sustainable approach to their cleaning processes. We are providing solutions that use less electricity, less water, less chemicals, so it is more productive, more cost efficient, more sustainable; that is our job.
In the Middle East, which are the markets you see most growth potential in?
JP: Some have been steadily growing like the UAE for example, like Saudi Arabia. Some have been more erratic with the changes in particular regimes that have been observed.
But Egypt is an important country for us. It has been a little bit more erratic but overall, when you take the trend over the last five to six years, it has been a very high growth country for us. Dubai and the UAE are becoming a very big touristic region. Hotel building is strong. We are the heart of our growth here.
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