Owens Illinois
A potential turnaround story
Introduction
Today we bring to your attention a company in the midst of restructuring. A potential turnaround that has shown early signs of solid execution and has structural tailwinds favoring the process. Owens-Illinois (OI) company is one of the key players in the beverage industry, the biggest glass manufacturer in the world and the first company to ever mass-produce glass bottles. It operates globally, with manufacturing plants in the entire Americas, Europe and Asia.
For those of you that have previously heard of OI, a company with a cursed history may come to mind. The track record of the company is not too inviting, the investing community had labelled OI as a company with “poor governance”.
Fortunately, in May 2024 an inflection point happened, the new CEO Gordon Hardie radically changed the strategy of the company. We have known OI for a long time, but since the CEO change, we have closely monitored each of their decisions and financial impacts. Since May, OI has continuously been passing our investment tests and this led us to meet with the management multiple times.
Since the start of 2025, many regulatory measures have emerged supporting the turnaround of OI and these have gone under the radar of the investors. Currently, there is no analyst of the company discussing the immediate catalysts that we have identified in our research.
In this write-up, we discuss:
Why OI has underperformed the market until this day.
What measures the management has taken to address the past poor governance.
The specifics of 6 catalysts that are going to boost the operating results in the short-term
The runway for growth in the medium term
Our opinion on how to benefit from this situation
When discussing event-driven turnarounds we always like to remind ourselves of this quote from the legendary investor Peter Lynch: “Turnarounds seldom turn, but when they do, the upside can be tremendous”