For years, SIG sold investors on the elegance of a razor/razor-blade model: place aseptic filling machines (the razors) and harvest a long tail of high-margin carton sleeves, closures and service (the blades). In a market that looked like a comfortable duopoly with Tetra Pak, that story made sense. Then came a shopping tour. In 2022 SIG struck two deals—first Scholle IPN for €1.36 billion enterprise value, then Evergreen Asia for $335 million—and the portfolio tilted away from its aseptic stronghold toward lower-margin adjacencies. The hangover arrived on Sept. 18, 2025, when SIG warned on 2025 growth, paused its cash dividend, and booked mostly non-cash impairments tied to acquired intangibles while promising to streamline non-aseptic activities. Shares fell about 20% on the day.

The strategic logic at signing was breadth: Scholle IPN brought global leadership in bag-in-box and No. 2 share in spouted pouches, plus a bigger U.S. footprint; Evergreen Asia added presence in chilled dairy cartons in China, Taiwan and South Korea. But the economics were never as rich as aseptic cartons. Scholle IPN generated ~€474 million revenue and ~€90 million adjusted EBITDA in 2021; the headline multiple worked out to roughly 14.5× EBITDA (about 12× including targeted cost synergies). Evergreen Asia contributed ~€135–160 million revenue and ~€24 million adjusted EBITDA with ~€6 million cost synergies on paper—again, lower-margin than SIG’s core. Those price tags were full even in a buoyant 2022 market for packaging assets.

The immediate side-effect was leverage. Between year-end 2021 and mid-2022, net debt rose and the net-leverage ratio stepped up to ~3.1× from ~2.5×, a tolerable level in good times but one that narrows room for error if volumes soften or integration drags. It also meant a larger share count (new shares issued to fund Scholle IPN) just as margins faced resin and freight headwinds. When 2025 brought weaker volumes, the cushion thinned—and management reached for the dividend pause to prioritize deleveraging.

More important than the balance sheet is the business mix. SIG’s investor materials long highlighted the cash-compounder dynamic of installed aseptic fillers driving years of sleeve consumption; sleeves and closures used to account for the overwhelming bulk of revenue. Scholle’s flexible formats and Evergreen’s chilled cartons simply don’t monetize like that. They broadened the catalogue but diluted the group’s weighted margin and complicated the story investors bought at IPO: an asset-light annuity tethered to a defensible aseptic systems moat.

The company now says, in effect, the center must hold. In its reset, SIG framed the problem as group-wide volume softness and a portfolio clean-up of smaller, lower-quality non-aseptic pieces—corporate code for trimming what doesn’t earn its keep while refocusing capital and management time on aseptic systems (carton and the parts of Scholle that can be “upgraded” to aseptic-adjacent value). It is a return to first principles: protect the filler-plus-consumables flywheel and let the commodity edge-cases go.

Enter Ola Rollén. Elected chair at the August 2025 AGM after being nominated last fall, Rollén inherits an assignment that suits his reputation: simplify, refocus, and demand returns that clear the cost of capital, not the hype of a deal model. The mandate is clear enough—separate the crown jewels from the costume jewelry, migrate what’s migratable toward aseptic system economics, and sell or shrink the rest. If he succeeds, SIG can look again like what it told investors it was: an aseptic systems company that occasionally buys capabilities—rather than a buyer of capabilities that happens to own an aseptic systems company.

There’s a broader lesson here for serial acquirers: adjacency is not the same as synergy. Paying double-digit multiples for assets with structurally lower margins and weaker razor-blade mechanics can work—if volumes accelerate, synergies are real, and the balance sheet stays nimble. When those ifs wobble, the premium you paid shows up later as an impairment charge, a guidance reset, or both. SIG has now marked that chapter to market. What comes next is execution: fewer distractions, tighter capital allocation, and a recommitment to the duopoly economics that made aseptic the right story in the first place.