Crown Holdings is planning to build a second beverage can plant in Thailand as part of its capital projects for 2025.

The project was revealed during an analysts conference following the release of the US-based canmaker’s year-end results.

These showed that Crown had posted fourth-quarter global sales that almost matched its record figure in the same period of 2021, with its global beverage can volumes up 5% year-on-year.

Quizzed about the company’s potential for growth, chief executive Timothy Donahue said that in Europe existing capacity could meet expected “single-digit” growth, but suggested there was between USD300m and USD400m for maintenance and capital projects.

Commenting on the market in China and Southeast Asia, Donahue said: “We continue to do well in Cambodia; Vietnam is a little softer than we would like. We’ve modelled a decline in our volumes in China, but an increase in Southeast Asia. So we’ll certainly hold on to the gains we’ve made and [the] cost base is really in a good place for when volume returns for it to flow through to the bottom line.”

One capital project was in Thailand. Donahue said: “Can we grow into the capacity we have installed over the next couple of years without significant capital being spent? For the most part, yes. We’ve got a line we’re going to install in Thailand in the near term. It’s a joint venture with a very large global energy company and they want us to expand the footprint there.”

Donahue didn’t say where the line would be installed, the capacity or investment involved, or the name of the joint-venture partner.

Following the flooding of its original plant in 2011, Crown has operated a beverage can plant at Nong Khae with the original line augmented by another in 2016 to give capacity now estimated at almost two billion cans a year.

Other beverage can plants in Thailand are run by Bangkok Can (with two operations, one of which is a Toyo Seikan subsidiary), NCI (the largest with four lines), Thai Beverage, and Carabao, a joint venture with Japan’s Showa-Denko. Market demand is about 6.5bn cans a year.