Causes of company failure and failure paths: The rise and fall of a producer of industrial foils and bags

Abstract

One of the prevalent concerns in present times, for both management academics and practitioners, relates to the principles which determine corporate success and failure. Although many models discover early symptoms of failure by using financial information, there is a lack of a deeper insight into the real causes of company failure and into the way they influence each other. The symptoms one can discover in the annual accounts are the consequence of a process that generally started long before. This case study of IFoil, once a leading European producer of industrial foils, biodegradable packing materials and bin bags, describes the rise and fall of a firm with an ambitious but risky strategy. This strategy proceeded from a management buy-out in 1996 and ended with a failure in 2003. In the case, we aim to analyse and describe IFoil's causes of failure and failure path in detail.