Buying Sonoco’s flexible-packaging and thermoforming businesses for about $1.8 billion to fill out North American packaging (2025)

A pattern of investment that takes its time, then leaps

The character of this acquisition shows less in its being a single large deal than in its being the culmination of an investment sequence more than a decade long. Placing footholds point by point — Asia in 2008, North America in 2016 — and quietly widening its supply network, then at the summit taking in Sonoco’s business as a whole: this way of taking its time to prepare the conditions before leaping its scale all at once reveals the company’s pattern of investment. Its method of partnering with a foreign counterpart to secure a growth market has not changed since it imported Europe’s platemaking technology at its founding in 1900.

The question that remains is whether the scale it has spread across the map can be turned into profit. How a business into which some $1.8B (¥271bn) was poured will contribute to group earnings can only be answered by the figures from the term ending March 2026 onward, when consolidation begins. To survive not as a printing company but through a business portfolio freed of printing’s frame — how far TOPPAN, having taken ‘Printing’ out of its name, can embody in overseas flexible packaging the course the Maro regime drew is a question about to be put to the test.