THE SOAP COMPANY FROM GERMANY WENT INTO BANKRUPTCY AGAIN

The company Kappus from Baden-Württemberg announced its bankruptcy. A brand with more than a century and a half of history (the company was founded in 1848) could not cope with the rise in raw material prices and employee wages. On September 30, the application for financial insolvency of the organization was submitted to the District Court of Freiburg.

According to the publication Lebensmittelzeitung, the company undertakes to maintain income for 181 employees. The upcoming procedure of self-managed restructuring allows the company to carry out business operations. In addition, the "daughter" of the brand (the firm Cossavon from Kehl) will not be affected by the upcoming bankruptcy.

The company has already started looking for possible investors, but so far it has not been possible to find financiers who want to enter the soap business.

The Freiburg Court appointed Dirk Pel, representing the legal agency Schultze &Braun, as the temporary administrator of the organization.

For the German soap manufacturer, the upcoming bankruptcy procedure is already the second in recent years. The firm filed its first application in the fall of 2018. Even then, price pressure and rising prices for raw materials made the brand insolvent. The restructuring began, which ended with the sale of the company to the Munich investment firm Ad Astra.

The new investor then acquired two plants of the company (Heitersheim and Riesa), later adding to them another site in Kehl (the city is located in Baden-Württemberg). It seemed that after the consolidation stage, the firm could proceed to the development stage. On November 1, 2021, a new manager was appointed to the company, who assumed responsibility for R&D, marketing and sales.

However, in 2022, it was decided to launch the legal procedure caused by bankruptcy again.

For a company that annually produces 260 million units of products (solid and liquid soap), the situation with rising prices for energy and raw materials turned out to be critical.

According to experts, the decision of the head of the company Axel Buchholz is correct. Philippe Grub (head of the Grub Brugger law firm) believes that the upcoming restructuring will allow the firm to increase its competitiveness in the global market. For a company that supplies soap to 30 countries, the economic situation leaves no other choice.

Recall that Kappus is not the first victim of the European energy crisis to declare bankruptcy. At the beginning, we already talked about the situation with the bankruptcy of the Hakle factory, an equally well-known manufacturer of toilet paper, which found itself in a similar situation as the soap manufacturer.