The packaging company acquired 270-staff TRM Packaging in Wigan, Greater Manchester. The company has around 270 staff.

DS Smith chief executive Miles Roberts said the deal, completed on 24 March, would complement DS Smith both geographically and in its FMCG customer focus.

Group communications director Hugo Fisher added: “We will integrate TRM into the DS Smith brand at some point in the future.

“We would never say there will never be redundancies because we constantly review the situation across the entire company, but we are certainly looking to grow the business.

“We are not giving financial details about their business or talking about individuals, but historically the output of TRM was 40,000 tonnes.

“It is small in comparison to DS Smith, which is a big, international business with turnover last year on £4bn, and a large proportion of that is outside the UK. But the company's location near Wigan is an area we are not particularly well represented.”

For DS Smith, this is the latest in a series of acquisitions across Europe. Last December it announced plans to acquire FMCG packaging company Milas Ambalaj in Istanbul despite seeing a 26% dip in pre-tax profits to £91m.

And two months before the London-headquartered packaging company acquired Greek corrugated packaging business of Cukurova Group.

In June 2015 DS Smith completed its acquisition of Austria-based recycled corrugated board packaging business Duropack.

Meanwhile kit investments include the world's first HP PageWide Web Press T1100S, which DS Smith said was due to be sited in West Yorkshire this May.