Cristalería del Ecuador S.A. Cridesa

—

What it is

Cristalería del Ecuador S.A. (Cridesa) is an Ecuadorian company headquartered in Guayaquil that operates in the manufacturing of pressed and blown glass objects and glass containers. Its core activity is the fabrication of glass containers — bottles for soft drinks, beers, spirits, pharmaceuticals, and food.

The company was founded on 23 July 1965, making it one of Ecuador’s oldest continuously operating industrial companies; its plant sits at Km 22.5 of the Vía Perimetral in Guayaquil. With roughly 198 employees running what amounts to a single large continuous-melting furnace operation, Cridesa is a lean, capital-intensive manufacturer — the kind of business where scale and technology matter more than headcount.

—

Who owns it

Cridesa is an Ecuadorian industry that belongs to the multinational group Owens-Illinois, now trading as O-I Glass, Inc. (NYSE: OI). The specific ownership structure is disclosed in Cridesa’s own audited financial statements: the controlling shareholder is OI Ecuador LLC, a US-incorporated entity, which holds 69% of the share capital; the remaining 31% constitutes the free float, with all shares registered in Ecuador’s securities registry.

O-I Glass is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of glass packaging, with a dominant position across North America, South America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe; roughly one in every two glass containers produced worldwide is made by O-I, its subsidiaries, or its licensees. For Cridesa’s minority shareholders — those 31% free-float shares traded on the Bolsa de Valores de Guayaquil — strategy, investment, and dividend policy are ultimately set in Perrysburg, Ohio.

—

Who runs it

Not published: the names of Cridesa’s local general manager (gerente general) and chief financial officer do not appear in the publicly accessible filings on the Bolsa de Valores de Guayaquil (issuer page, CRISTALERIADEL.EC, accessed July 2025), in the 2019 audited financial statements (the most recent full filing on the BVG), or in the company’s SCVS corporate-governance records as retrievable online. Ecuadorian securities law (Ley de Mercado de Valores and SCVS resolutions) requires listed companies to disclose their board composition and key executives in their annual memory/report; the most recent memoria anual was not found in publicly accessible form during this research.

At the parent level, O-I Glass appointed Gordon J. Hardie as Chief Executive Officer in April 2024, succeeding Andres Lopez, who had previously announced his intention to retire.

Hardie’s priorities — cost discipline, furnace efficiency, and portfolio rationalisation across O-I’s global network — will flow directly down to Cridesa as the group’s Andean operating unit.

—

The money, in plain words

Ecuador uses the US dollar as its currency, so there is no exchange-rate risk in Cridesa’s numbers. The most recent full set of audited financial statements publicly available is for the year ending 31 December 2019, filed with the Bolsa de Valores de Guayaquil.

Not published: revenue, net profit, net margin, return on equity, total assets, and debt levels for the years 2020–2024 are held by the SCVS and the BVG but were not accessible in open-access form at the time of writing; EMIS confirms that 2024 financial data exists, but only behind a commercial paywall. Under SCVS Resolution No. SC.DSC.G.16.0000427, companies listed on Ecuador’s securities market are required to file audited annual financial statements with the regulator, which are in principle public.

The most recent summary signal available — from EMIS — shows that Cridesa reported net income growth of approximately 10% in the period ending Q2 2025, suggesting the business has momentum. The last fully public dividend data point — a total cash dividend of $10,021,744 paid in March 2019, equal to $0.4772 per share against a last traded price of $4.00 — implied a yield of roughly 11.9% at that price (our calculation), which for a manufacturing company would be very high; it likely reflected a special or accumulated distribution rather than a recurring payout.

—

What it is doing now

Owens Illinois Andean, operating in Ecuador as O-I Cridesa, partnered with recycling platform ReciVeci to create the country’s first Glass Hub — a dedicated glass-collection centre designed to shorten the gap between consumers, informal recyclers, and Cridesa’s furnaces in Guayaquil. Similar hubs already exist in Colombia (four) and Peru (one); Ecuador’s is the first.

For a glass furnace that runs continuously and consumes large amounts of cullet (recycled broken glass) to lower its energy costs, a reliable domestic recycling supply chain is both a sustainability story and a hard economic advantage.

Trade data confirms Cridesa is also an active exporter: as recently as December 2024 it shipped glass products to Cristalería Peldar S.A. in Colombia, indicating the plant serves O-I’s broader Andean network and is not purely a domestic supplier. Revenue grew roughly 10% and total assets held almost flat — up less than 1% — in the most recent reported period, pointing to a business generating more sales from an existing asset base: in other words, sweating its furnace harder, which is exactly what a capital-intensive glass maker should do.

—

What to watch

• Disclosure gap: Cridesa’s audited financials for 2020–2024 are not freely accessible online despite Ecuador’s listed-company disclosure rules. Investors in the 31% free float deserve — and are legally entitled to — current numbers. When those filings surface, revenue trajectory and margin recovery post-pandemic will be the first things to read.
• Parent O-I Glass strategy: O-I Glass (NYSE: OI) has been rationalising its global portfolio under heavy debt. Any decision to divest, restructure, or consolidate Andean assets would move directly to Cridesa’s future.
• Recycled glass supply: Glass furnaces are most efficient when they burn a high share of cullet. If the ReciVeci Glass Hub scales, it lowers Cridesa’s raw-material cost per bottle — a direct margin lever that does not require a single new customer.
• Ecuador’s macroeconomic stability: The country’s dollarisation removes currency risk, but Ecuador’s ongoing fiscal pressures and periodic power-rationing episodes (which affect energy-intensive manufacturers most) are real operational risks for a company whose furnace cannot be switched off.

—

This is news, not investment advice.