StockSignal
Sonoco Products Co.
SON · ARCX · Packaging & Containers · United States
Sonoco Products Co. is a leading manufacturer of engineered and sustainable packaging solutions, operating primarily in the Consumer Packaging and Industrial Paper Packaging segments. The company designs, develops, manufactures, and sells a diverse portfolio of products including round and shaped rigid paper, steel, and plastic containers, metal and peelable membrane ends, closures, components, flexible and rigid plastics, reels, spools, pallets, and composite cans. These offerings serve a wide range of consumer and industrial end markets across the United States, Europe, Canada, the Asia Pacific, and other international regions. Sonoco Products Co. emphasizes sustainable packaging innovations to meet demands in sectors such as food, beverages, personal care, healthcare, and various industrial applications. Founded in 1899 and headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, the company plays a vital role in the global packaging industry by providing reliable, protective, and environmentally conscious solutions that support supply chain efficiency and product integrity.
Industry
Packaging & Containers
Consumer Cyclical sector · United States
Stories
Structural patterns identified in Sonoco Products Co.
No stories identified yet.
Key Metrics
Track Record
Upcoming
Valuation9
Coordination
Supply Chain
Paper and Pulp Supply Chain
The paper and pulp supply chain is governed by three structural constraints that determine who can produce, what they can produce, and how the industry evolves: cellulose fiber dependency means all paper requires either virgin wood pulp from managed forests or recycled fiber that degrades with each reuse cycle, mill capital intensity means a modern pulp mill costs one to three billion dollars and must run continuously to remain economical, and the packaging shift means paper demand is migrating from printing and writing grades to packaging as e-commerce grows — but the same mills cannot easily switch between grades, creating simultaneous overcapacity and shortage across different product categories.
Plastics Supply Chain
The plastics supply chain converts oil and gas derivatives into the polymer materials that become bottles, packaging, pipes, dashboards, medical tubing, and shopping bags, governed by three root constraints: petrochemical feedstock dependency that permanently couples plastic economics to energy markets, resin-to-product diversity explosion where a handful of base resins branch into millions of end products through compounding, molding, and extrusion with incompatible specifications, and recycling thermodynamics where most plastics degrade with each reprocessing cycle — unlike metals — creating a structural downcycling problem that limits circularity.