Moulding the future: scale, succession and circularity at Styrocoop

Learning outcomes

Teaching Objective 1: Students should be able to evaluate strategic trade-offs between scale, differentiation and sustainability in a capital-constrained emerging market small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), using Porter’s Five Forces and the resource-based view to compare mutually constrained options and construct a sequenced strategic roadmap.

Teaching Objective 2: Students should understand how process innovation and ecological infrastructure – such as closed-loop heat recovery, waste reprocessing and on-site renewable energy – can generate competitive advantage in SMEs and be able to distinguish sustainability as a strategic resource from sustainability as a compliance exercise.

Teaching Objective 3: Students should be able to assess intergenerational succession as a strategic inflection point in a founder-led family business, recognising how the founder’s formative experiences shape risk preferences that the successor must understand before she can transcend them.

Teaching Objective 4: Students should be able to examine how institutional constraints and emerging circular economy regulation – specifically the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) – shape the returns on sustainability investment for firms operating outside the EU Single Market.

Teaching Objective 5: Students should be able to apply scenario analysis to a strategic choice made under geopolitical uncertainty: selecting the small number of external variables that genuinely drive outcomes for a small firm, constructing internally consistent scenarios from them and testing which strategic option is most robust across those futures rather than optimal in any single one.

Case overview/synopsis

On 27 January 2026, Ivana Filipović Malada, the operational leader of Styrocoop – a family-owned expanded polystyrene (EPS) manufacturer in Beloševac, near Valjevo, in Western Serbia – must choose among three strategic directions for a company that has just posted its strongest financial year on record while, for only the second time in its nearly three-decade history, carrying long-term bank debt.

Founded in 1997 by Ivana’s father Milomir, the company operates with 19 employees and €1.44m in annual revenue. Its ecological architecture – a founder-conceptualised closed-loop heat-recovery system, in-house EPS waste reprocessing and rooftop solar – predates any regulatory compulsion. Ivana’s recent strategic moves (solar investment, a senior hire from the main competitor and state-subvention-financed equipment) have restored net margins to 15% and earned an AA+ creditworthiness rating.

But January 2026 brings converging pressures: rising oil prices, active debt service obligations, customer concentration in the Hisense–Gorenje white-goods complex, and the EU PPWR becoming generally applicable in seven months. Ivana must choose among: (A) diversifying the packaging customer base; (B) activating Serbia’s underdeveloped insulation market; or (C) scaling the firm’s circular-economy infrastructure into a vertical-integration play aligned with PPWR requirements. Because that choice must be made in an unusually unsettled external environment – an oil market re-pricing on Middle Eastern and Latin American risk, a managed-float currency, a Chinese-owned anchor customer manufacturing in a non-EU country for the EU market and an accession path that is neither closed nor advancing quickly – the case also supports an explicit exercise in scenario analysis.

Complexity academic level

This case is designed for MBA, executive MBA, executive education and advanced undergraduate students in courses on Strategic Management, Sustainability Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Family Business and Emerging Market Business. It may serve as a capstone-style integrative exercise in strategy modules, a flagship case for circular-economy electives or a succession case in family business courses.

Subject code

CSS 11 Strategy.