The ever-changing world and increasingly complex and competitive economic context requires companies to achieve a continuous capacity for adaptation and organization. As a result, Corticeira Amorim has decided to implement a significant change to its organizational model: through the creation of Amorim Cork Solutions. This new business unit (BU) results from the merger of Amorim Cork Composites, Amorim Cork Flooring and Amorim Cork Insulation.

Amorim Cork Solutions is expected to boost the growth of Corticeira Amorim’s activity, leveraging synergies, resulting in a more efficient organization and diversification of its portfolio of “non-cork” operations. João Pedro Azevedo, the CEO of Amorim Cork Solutions, says: “We are part of the world’s largest company in the cork industry. Beyond financial results and objectives, we have an overriding goal: to create and develop new applications for cork beyond stoppers and we want some of these applications to gain a dimension that they probably never had before”.

The creation of Amorim Cork Solutions makes it possible to scale up existing applications, making them more competitive, and strengthens Research and Development and Innovation (R&D+i): “Our vision is not a pool of small applications. It’s to have several applications whose business is already sufficiently critical to make a very positive and significant net contribution to the company’s results, but at the same time also to have the capacity to continue to provoke and discover new possibilities, new horizons and new applications for cork. Certainly some of these will have a future, while others will just be a learning curve,” explains João Pedro Azevedo.

Exploiting synergies

Amorim Cork Solutions will operate with its own dynamic, with an equally robust, flexible and agile structure as the sum of the three integrated business units. The CEO explains that each factory (there are more than a dozen in the new BU) and each Amorim Cork Solutions sales team will have an associated profit and loss account, in order to ensure accountability, visibility and responsibility in all areas of the BU’s structure. Amorim Cork Solutions will thus be an example of a merger in which synergies and mutual learning are maximized, in which R&D+i will play a core role.

João Pedro Azevedo highlights that one of the biggest advantages of the new structure is the ability to transfer knowledge between different segments and applications: “We have a great deal of in-house knowledge and can transfer the know-how of an application, or the technical requirements of a material, from one segment to another. Although the business context is often very different, the basis of properties of materials and technological processes can often serve multiple segments and multiplications."

"The energy sector is a prime example - specifically electric batteries, an area that we have only recently begun to explore, through development of solutions for cell spacers, that must meet extremely demanding requirements, in terms of resistance to high temperatures, where our experience in the aerospace sector constitutes an excellent starting point. Another example, from another perspective, is sealing applications. For any sealing challenge, regardless of the sector for which it is intended, we can ascertain what kind of materials can be effectively combined with cork, which materials can meet the requirements, what kind of technologies are used. All the business units now to be merged have capacities, expertise and technologies that can be used in multiple applications and sectors”, summarizes João Pedro Azevedo.

Integrating Solutions

In order to generate greater efficiency and boost the company’s sustainable growth, this merger opens up new possibilities for the future. But it also marks a return to our origins – back to 1963 when the first industrial unit was created to develop a business beyond the area of cork stoppers. The aim was to valorize the waste produced by Amorim & Irmãos, Lda. (now Amorim Cork, S.A.), resulting from the manufacture of cork stoppers, and transform it into granules which could be used to produce agglomerated cork and thereby develop a range of new cork applications. 60 years later, the “non-stopper” operations are once again being combined into a single BU, with greater capacity and ambition.

In the same way that cork stoppers are associated with cork and Corticeira Amorim’s premium, high performance cork stoppers, João Pedro Azevedo emphasizes that the principal goal is “to direct cork towards the applications that generate the greatest value for it” and create an automatic link between the wealth of possible cork applications and Amorim Cork Solutions. The new BU will act as an aggregating center, endowed with tremendous expertise and flexibility, to expand the potential of cork.

“We want the world’s leading companies, whether in the area of flooring, mobility, energy or aerospace, to think of cork and Amorim Cork Solutions whenever they consider introducing or developing a material or application that is clearly suited to the properties of cork. No other company in the world has such extensive in-depth knowledge, and at the same time such diverse and specialized knowledge of how cork can be combined with multiple materials, how cork works with so many technologies, in so many applications and in so many sectors. This is unique. And it’s the solution.” concludes Amorim Cork Solutions’ CEO.