Metal, glass, plastic, and paper packaging Four categories of downstream dependence: Which is more dependent on customers? Metal, glass, plastic, and paper packaging companies are doing the same thing: selling containers to consumer goods companies. But when it comes to customers, their situations are worlds apart. Some can smoothly pass on raw material price increases and expand profits year after year, while others can only cut capacity and watch profit margins narrow. The difference is not about whether paper, metal, plastic, or glass is used, but about two things: how concentrated downstream customers are and how easily this packaging can be replaced. Understanding these two points allows you to judge which of the four types of packaging is more constrained by downstream users, and also see under what conditions these constraints might be broken or even reversed. Determining dependency: First, look at two variables. The bargaining power of downstream packaging companies can be broken down into two measurable variables. Customer Concentration: Measures how much a company is affected when a customer leaves. The commonly used method is the proportion of revenue from the top five customers, or the proportion of the top one customer. The higher the proportion, the greater the cost of lost orders, and the less likely companies are to be strict on pricing. Material substitutability: Measures whether customers can switch suppliers or materials. It depends on whether there is an exclusive contract, dedicated equipment, degree of customization, and technical thresholds. The easier it is to be replaced, the more passive the supplier is. These two variables usually overlap in the same direction, but can go in opposite directions. When customers are highly concentrated and this packaging is easily replaced, packaging companies are at a disadvantage: losing customers is costly, retaining customers is limited, and they can only compromise on price and payment terms. Conversely, even if customers are concentrated, as long as there are exclusive bindings, dedicated filling equipment, or high switching costs, bargaining relationships may reverse, and packaging companies end up holding the chips. So who is dominated downstream is not a matter of material availability, but rather a specific combination of materials and applications. Another point is easy to confuse: macro data like total market size and industry growth rate are not the same as customer concentration. In a fast-growing category, if buyers are highly concentrated, packaging companies still lack pricing power. The following judgments are based on customer structure and actual bargaining performance, not industry prosperity. Metal: Highest concentration, but most complete buffer mechanism. Metal beverage cans are the most typical category of customer concentration. Downstream are highly concentrated beverage giants, and the canning segment itself has become oligopolistic. In the U.S. aluminum beverage can market, Ball and Crown together account for about 60% to 65% of the market share. In its annual risk disclosure, Ball has long stated that most of the company's packaging products are sold to a relatively small number of beverage and food companies in North America, Europe, and China. Losing a major client or changes in supply agreements could have a substantial impact, but long-term contracts have mitigated this risk. Concentrated buyers should suppress canners' profits, but data for 2025 shows that leading canners are actually expanding their profits. The reason lies in two buffer mechanisms. The first clause is the raw material price linkage clause. Ball's 2025 revenue is expected to rise from $11.8 billion in 2024 to $13.16 billion. Sales in the North American beverage packaging segment grew 4.8% for the year, mainly due to improvements in pricing and product mix as aluminum costs are passed downstream by contract, and adjusted free cash flow for the year hit a record $956 million. Crown's net sales for 2025 increased from $11.80 billion to $12.365 billion, including $507 million in raw material cost pass-through. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year was about $2.1 billion, up about 8%, and free cash flow was $1.146 billion, both record-high. Under long-term contract structures with linkage clauses, can manufacturers shift most of the cost fluctuation risk onto buyers, earning relatively stable processing profits themselves. The second point is that material substitution is favorable to can manufacturers. Crown management stated that aluminum cans are now the preferred choice for about 80% of new beverage products when choosing packaging, while glass and plastic continue to gain market share. When the alternative trend points to themselves, canmakers are not entirely passive in negotiations. The Chinese market presents this kind of dependency more clearly. Leading metal packaging company Origin early adopted a follow-up layout, building its factory about 800 meters from Red Bull's factory in China. Wherever Red Bull set up its factory, its production capacity followed. When it went public in 2012, the company's top five customers contributed 92.64% of revenue, with China Red Bull alone accounting for 70.56%. This single-customer dependence was actively diluted over the following decade or so. By 2023, Red Bull's share dropped to 33.65%, and by 2025, the top five customers in the 2025 interim report would account for about 55%. The key to dilution is mergers and acquisitions and customer diversification: in April 2025, Origin completed the acquisition and integration of COFCO Packaging for over 5.5 billion yuan, raising its two-piece can market share from about 20% to about 37%, and the top three industry concentrations rising to over 75%. During the acquisition period, the company achieved revenue of 11.727 billion yuan in the first half of 2025, a year-on-year increase of 62.74%, and net profit of about 903 million yuan, up 64.66% year-on-year. The other two main suppliers in the two-piece can market are Baosteel Packaging and Shengxing Co., Ltd., forming a leading structure together with Origin and COFCO. Metal cans also have a favorable backdrop: demand is still expanding. China's beer canning rate is about 27%, still significantly lower than the global average of 48.6%, and far below the 65% level in countries like the UK and US. Higher canning rates mean that demand for two-piece cans will continue to grow, and suppliers won't have to endlessly negotiate prices to retain existing customers. Expansion has also faced setbacks, with geopolitical factors causing disruptions. Crown's Asia-Pacific sales in the fourth quarter of 2025 are expected to decline by about 3% year-on-year. The case of Origin also exposes the internal differentiation within metal packaging, with a significant difference in bargaining power between three-piece and two-piece cans. Three-piece cans: The industry structure is relatively favorable, with major food and beverage companies having relatively fixed suppliers, making it difficult for new entrants to leverage them. Origin is the exclusive metal packaging supplier for China Red Bull. The two parties are mutually dependent, and their gross margin has long remained stable above 20%, forming the company's profit base. Two-piece tanks: Many domestic suppliers and high degree of marketization; most end customers do not have exclusive relationships with can manufacturers, frequent low-price competition and large profit fluctuations. In 2024, the unit price for two-piece cans once dropped to about 0.32 yuan per can, but after leading consolidation, industry synergy pushed it back to the 0.35 to 0.38 yuan range. Both are metal cans, but monopoly binding and full competition have led to completely different bargaining outcomes. This also explains why the industry is increasing concentration through mergers and acquisitions: can manufacturers are using supply-side concentration to hedge against demand-side concentration. Position of metals: The highest customer concentration, but relying on cost-linked long-term contracts, favorable alternative directions, and supply-side mergers and acquisitions, leading companies have kept their dependence within manageable limits. The cost was that the acquisition increased leverage, with Origin significantly increasing interest-bearing debt after the acquisition, and its gross margin in Q3 2025 once dropped to about 13.5%, putting short-term profit pressure on it. Glass: Equally concentrated, but with almost no buffer Glass and metal serve the same concentrated beverage buyers, but lack the buffer of metal, making them the most passive in 2025. Downstream of glass bottles are beer, wine, spirits, as well as food canning, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. Among them, liquor buyers are concentrated, and glass is facing replacement by aluminum cans and PET bottles. If downstream demand contracts, it will almost directly affect glass factories' operating rates and prices. Financial data for 2025 confirms this passivity. O-I Glass, the world's largest glass packaging company, posted annual net sales of about $6.4 billion, slightly lower than last year's $6.5 billion, and recorded a net loss for the year. Segment operating profit was $846 million, up 13%, but almost all of the incremental revenue came from cost-cutting programs (contributing about $300 million that year) rather than volume-price improvements. Its European division's operating profit fell by 17%, due to unfavorable net prices, declining sales volume, and idle capacity. European glass leader Verallia's revenue is expected to reach about 3.3 billion euros in 2025, with a 3.4% decline on a constant basis, excluding Argentina; Net profit was 93 million euros, down 60.8% year-on-year; Adjusted EBITDA margin fell from 24.5% to 21.1%, with revenue weighed down by negative price effects and an unfavorable product mix. The most dragging factors are beer and sparkling wine, especially in Germany, where demand is weak; relatively robust are food cans and non-alcoholic beverages. The glass factory's response precisely reflects its weak bargaining power: with the current downstream market softening and difficulty passing on costs like metals, they can only cut capacity and idle kilns to meet demand, relying on internal cost reductions to maintain profits. Prices are not something you can set yourself; what can be adjusted is mainly cost. This passivity is also combined with the rigidity on the cost side. Glass melting furnaces are heavy assets with high energy consumption and continuous operation. Energy price increases are difficult to quickly pass on to customers, so O-I has identified about $150 million in energy costs in 2026 as one of the main headwinds. The combined factors of concentrated buyers, substitution pressure, and rigid costs minimize the adjustment space for glass among the four types of materials. There is also differentiation inside the glass. Pharmaceutical glass requires high thermal stability and chemical inertness, while high-end spirits and cosmetic glass carries brand premiums. These applications are highly differentiated and have low substitutability, and glass factories have a significantly better bargaining position than mainstream beer bottles. Both O-I and Verallia emphasize shifting toward higher-end, more resilient product portfolios by 2025, essentially shifting toward applications with lower substitutability. Glass position: Customer concentration is comparable to metals but lacks cost transfer clauses and is on the side being replaced, making it the most constrained downstream among the four categories. The only buffer is the shift toward differentiated uses such as pharmaceuticals and premium liquors. Plastics: The largest category span, with substitutability becoming a bargaining chip for buyers. Plastic packaging is hard to generalize because it has the largest internal span: PET bottles and preforms serve concentrated beverage buyers who overlap with metal and glass cans, putting them in a position similar to metal cans; Flexible packaging films and rigid containers target a much broader fast-moving consumer goods customer base, with low dependence on a single customer. Overall, plastics are medium-grade, with the degree depending on the specific category. The most significant structural change in plastic packaging in 2025 is the consolidation of leading players. Amcor completed its full share merger with Berry Global on April 30, 2025, becoming the largest player in the consumer and medical plastic packaging sector, with a announced synergy target of approximately $650 million. As the first full quarter after the merger, its net sales for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 (ending September 2025) reached $5.745 billion. Similar to metals, plastics leaders are also using scale to hedge downstream bargaining power, at the same cost of rising debt, with long-term debt after the merger totaling about $15 billion. Plastics have a distinguishing feature from other materials: high substitution and are a bargaining chip for buyers. Beverage companies can switch between aluminum cans, PET bottles, and glass bottles, and also compare prices among different plastic suppliers, with relatively low switching costs. This makes it difficult for plastic suppliers to gain exclusive positions except for a few flexible packaging structures with high technical barriers. Substitutability benefits can manufacturers in metals (substitution refers to aluminum cans), but is more disadvantageous in plastics (customers can switch at any time). But the interior of plastic is not monolithic. After merging with Berry, Amcor specifically emphasized two main directions: consumer and healthcare, which further confirms this logic. General daily chemicals, food flexible packaging: Close to full competition, customers easily switch suppliers, and high dependence. Medical and pharmaceutical plastic packaging: Requires drug regulatory approval, sterility verification, and long-term supply qualification certification. Once certified by customers, it is difficult to easily replace the packaging, resulting in high switching costs and relatively stable bargaining relationships. Plastic positioning: Average dependency is moderate. The key to judgment is not the label of plastic, but whether the specific product embeds certification or technical steps that customers find hard to avoid. Paper: Lowest average dependence, yet hides the strongest lock-in. Paper has the lowest average dependency among the four categories. Corrugated carton services serve e-commerce, retail, and extensive manufacturing, with a highly dispersed customer base where no single buyer dominates the entire industry. Smurfit Westrock, formed by the merger of Smurfit Kappa and WestRock in 2024, is projected to achieve net sales of $31.179 billion in 2025 and an adjusted EBITDA of about $4.939 billion, serving customers across multiple industries including food and beverage, e-commerce, and healthcare. The fragmented customer structure gives carton factories relatively more price autonomy. By 2025, the company will proactively adopt value-driven sales and balance supply and demand and manage prices through periodic shutdowns-practices that are difficult for suppliers tied to a single large buyer. But the internal differences in paper provide the most counterintuitive example throughout the text: not all paper packaging is weak in bargaining. Aseptic liquid packaging (such as Tetra Pak and Combi packs) is dominated by a very small number of manufacturers, with Tetra Pak (a privately owned Tetra Laval) and SIG leading the way, followed closely by Elopak and others. Their business model is a combination of equipment and materials: first, they install dedicated filling machines for dairy and juice companies, then supply matching cartons and caps over the long term. Once equipment is loaded onto a customer's production line, the switching cost is extremely high, allowing packaging suppliers to gain ongoing lock-in and pricing power. SIG's 2025 annual report shows that its business stability comes from long-term growth with existing customers, rather than competing for orders in open markets. For paper, corrugated boxes are at the end where low-order customers rely on them but lack pricing power, while aseptic liquid packaging is at the centralized end where bargaining leans toward suppliers. This mechanism is the same as the exclusive binding of metal three-piece tanks: when the conversion cost is high enough and the binding is deep enough, customer concentration no longer means the supplier is passive; instead, it may reverse into a bargaining advantage for the supplier. The Chinese market provides a complete sample of this mechanism and also exposes its boundaries. With its leadership in filling equipment, technical services, and packaging materials, Tetra Pak once held over 90% of China's aseptic packaging market share. Around 2013, its market shares in equipment, packaging materials, and technical services exceeded 50%, 60%, and 80% respectively. This dominance is maintained through equipment and service bundling, packaging, and loyalty discounts. In 2016, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce determined that Tetra Pak had abused its market dominance, fined it about 668 million yuan, and ordered it to stop bundling and other activities. Suppliers gain bargaining advantages by locking in equipment but are ultimately restricted by antitrust regulations.
After the penalties, the response of downstream dairy companies further shows that buyers won't accept being passive in the long run. Leading dairy companies like Yili and Mengniu actively support domestic second suppliers to lower packaging costs: Yili supports New Jufeng, and Mengniu supports Fenmei Packaging. By 2020, in China's aseptic liquid milk packaging market, the market shares of Tetra Pak, Fenmei, SIG, and New Jufeng were approximately 61.1%, 12.0%, 11.3%, and 9.6%, respectively. Domestic manufacturers continued to gain market share through price advantages and customer support.
It's worth noting that domestic suppliers themselves have high customer concentration. In 2020, Yili, New Jufeng's largest customer, contributed about 70% of its revenue, similar to how ORG early on was closely tied to Red Bull: starting by deeply binding with a major customer and then gradually diversifying. From 2023, New Jufeng further acquired about 28% of Fenmei Packaging and launched a tender offer, trying to connect the two major systems of Yili and Mengniu. This deal has already received approval from the State Administration for Market Regulation not to prohibit it.
Aseptic packaging thus shows three forces at the same time: suppliers secure bargaining power through equipment lock-in, regulators set boundaries for this lock-in, and buyers try to rebalance by supporting second suppliers and promoting domestic alternatives.
Position of paper: Corrugated boxes have the lowest average dependency but also lack pricing power; aseptic liquid packaging, due to equipment lock-in, is a typical example of reversed bargaining power, and this reversal is constrained by both regulation and buyer countermeasures.
Conclusion: It's not the material that decides the fate, but its application and the game around it.
Putting the four types together, a rough ranking of dependency from high to low is: glass (used for mainstream alcoholic beverages) higher than two-piece metal cans, higher than PET bottles, higher than three-piece metal cans and flexible packaging, higher than corrugated boxes. Aseptic liquid packaging, due to equipment lock-in, uniquely sits at the end of reversed bargaining power.
This ranking only holds under specific conditions; change the conditions, and the conclusion reverses. The real factors at play are the following adjustments:
- Cost pass-through clauses: Metal cans have long-term contracts linked to aluminum prices, whereas mainstream glass bottles lack similar price transmission. This is a direct reason why one sees profits expanding and the other seeing losses in 2025.
- Substitution direction: Aluminum cans benefit from substitution trends, whereas glass beer bottles and regular plastics are being substituted. The trend determines advantages or disadvantages in negotiation.
- Exclusivity or equipment binding: Exclusive supply of three-piece cans, or the filling machine lock-in for aseptic liquid packaging, can turn high customer concentration into bargaining chips for suppliers; two-piece cans lacking such binding fall into low-price competition.
- Degree of differentiation in use: Bargaining positions of pharmaceutical glass, high-end spirits bottles, and medical flexible packaging are much stronger than the same material in mass-market products.
- Buyer countermeasures and regulation: When supplier lock-in is too strong, downstream companies may actively support second suppliers and push domestic alternatives; regulators may also define boundaries using antitrust measures. Tetra Pak being penalized in China and dairy companies supporting second suppliers are examples.
Therefore, the correct way to identify who is dominated by downstream parties isn't to pick a material but to recognize two basic variables (customer concentration and material substitutability), and then layer on the adjustment factors of cost pass-through, binding method, usage differentiation, and buyer countermeasures:
- Glass used for mainstream alcoholic beverages is almost entirely in a disadvantaged position on these dimensions and is the most constrained by downstream parties in 2025;
- Leading metal and paper companies turn high concentration into manageable or even reversed bargaining relationships through long-term contracts, acquisitions, and equipment lock-in, but this advantage is still limited by leverage, buyer support for second suppliers, and regulation.
Material itself does not determine fate; it's these attributes in specific applications and the ongoing game between buyers and sellers that decide who controls whom.