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Emanuele Bona, Vice President Europe at the Pulp and Paper Products Council, delivered the conference’s closing presentation — a comprehensive review of global market pulp demand in the first quarter of 2026, near-term forecasts, and a five-year supply and demand outlook for both softwood and hardwood grades. He opened with an observation that had not been addressed directly by other speakers: the volume of pulp itself transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Of the eight countries with access to the strait, over 200,000 tonnes of softwood pulp — roughly 1% of global softwood demand, approximately half of it fluff — transited the region in 2025. Hardwood volumes were larger at over 800,000 tonnes, representing approximately 2% of global demand.

Emanuele Bona

Not extraordinary in the global context, Bona said, but significant enough to cause meaningful disruption to those supply chains. …Bona presented a world balance showing softwood operating rates holding at approximately 88% in 2026, with both demand and capacity falling roughly 1% each, and hardwood easing from 92% to approximately 90% as demand contracts more sharply than capacity. Over the longer term, both grades are expected to converge around 89% on average — a broadly balanced market, but one defined by slower growth, rising competitive pressure from Latin American hardwood and Western European softwood exports, and an end-use landscape that offers less upside than the previous decade.

Li Meng, General Manager of PPPC’s Beijing Office, presented an overview of China’s pulp and paper industry development and near-term outlook, structured around the country’s five-year plans — the medium-term strategic blueprints through which the Chinese government sets targets for economic growth, industry development, and environmental protection. Understanding those plans, she said, gives international market participants a reliable window into where Chinese policy is headed and what trade and investment conditions to expect.

Li Meng

China’s pulp and paper industry has grown substantially across the three most recently completed plan periods, spanning 2010 to 2025. The 14th plan period, covering 2020 to 2025, delivered the strongest growth of the last three — approximately 4.6% annually, representing a nearly 25% increase in total production over five years, with 2025 alone showing close to 4% growth in total pulp, paper, and board output. The arc across the three periods, Li said, reflects a progression from volume-driven expansion, through a phase of regulatory consolidation, to what she characterized as accelerated and more sustainable growth.

Mathieu Wener, Economist with Numera Analytics, presented PPPC and Numera’s latest data and forecasts on global tissue demand, wood-free paper, and boxboard markets, with a closing focus on China’s growing role as an exporter of finished paper and board products.

Mathieu Wener

His presentation painted a picture of a global industry in which aggregate growth continues but is increasingly uneven — slowing in mature markets, shifting in China from domestic consumption to export-driven production, and facing a demographic headwind in North America that will cap the upside for years to come. Global tissue demand grew 1.3% in the first two months of 2026 — the weakest pace since the post-COVID destocking period of 2021, and a slowdown from both last year’s pace and the decade-long trend.

Aki Temmes, Executive Vice President of UPM Fibres and a member of the UPM Group Executive Team, opened with a pointed observation about the moment the industry finds itself in: pulp buyers are operating under a tightening triangle of cost pressure, rising quality requirements, and supply security risk — three forces converging simultaneously in ways that make fibre selection more consequential than at any previous point in his 23 years with the company.

Aki Temmes

His presentation drew on UPM’s experience as a multi-fibre pulp producer — offering eucalyptus, Nordic softwood, and Nordic birch from mills on two continents — and on mill trial results demonstrating measurable value from deliberate, data-driven furnish optimization. Temmes noted that hardwood demand will continue to grow despite ongoing uncertainty and increasing Chinese domestic integration, and that softwood, while losing share across most grades, will maintain a relevant position because of its functional properties — particularly its impact on machine runability and end product quality.

Craig Murphy, Director and Global Service Lead for Bleaching Chemicals at Chemical Market Analytics by OPIS, framed his presentation around four regional stories — Latin America growing, China increasingly self-sufficient, North America in managed decline, and Europe under pressure — and traced how those trends are reshaping demand for the chemicals that pulp mills depend on to cook and bleach wood fibre.

Craig Murphy

Running through all of it is the Strait of Hormuz closure, which has created supply disruptions and cost pressures now working their way through chemical markets in ways the industry is still absorbing. …In the Q&A, Kelly McNamara asked which chemical market carries the greatest risk of supply disruption or price volatility for pulp producers. Murphy’s answer was sulfur — a core input to the kraft pulping process. It is a market already under structural pressure before the Hormuz closure, and one the closure is now compounding.

Ismo Nousiainen, CEO of Metsä Fibre, the world’s leading bleached softwood market pulp supplier, presented research and mill trial results making the case that northern bleached softwood kraft pulp — NBSK — remains an essential and performance-critical component in through-air-dried, or TAD,

Ismo Nousiainen

tissue production. TAD is the manufacturing technology behind premium tissue products — high-end bath tissue and kitchen towels — in which hot air rather than mechanical pressure dries the tissue web, producing significantly higher bulk, softness, and absorbency than conventional wet-pressed grades. It is the most demanding end use remaining for softwood pulp as hardwood substitution continues across other grades, and the segment where softwood’s functional properties are most clearly differentiated.

Christian Chavassieu, Managing Partner of CelCo, presented on the dissolving wood pulp market — a sector representing approximately 10% of total pulp production, with supply dynamics, competitive structures, and end-use markets that differ significantly from standard market pulp.

Christian Chavassieu

His presentation covered supply, demand, pricing, and competitive structure across the sector’s main sub-segments, with particular focus on the diverging fortunes of commodity textile grades versus specialty grades, the growing role of alternative fibres, and a live anti-dumping trade case at the US Department of Commerce whose outcome could materially reshape sourcing patterns in the US market within days of the conference.

On supply, Chavassieu noted that dissolving wood pulp capacity has grown at roughly 4.1% annually over the past decade, though that pace has slowed recently with the closure of two facilities — a GP mill in the US and the Tembec mill in Temiscaming — and only modest new capacity coming online, primarily from Brazil and a new mill in Portugal.

Jouni Martiskainen, Project Development Manager with Svante — a Vancouver-based carbon capture technology company with approximately 270 employees and nearly 20 years of development history — presented on the commercial case for carbon capture at pulp mills, covering the financial mechanisms available to support it, the technology the company has developed, and the specific projects underway in the forest products sector. …A central point in Martiskainen’s presentation was why pulp mills are particularly well positioned for carbon capture. The kraft pulping process produces black liquor, which is combusted in the recovery boiler — generating the white plume of steam visible at any kraft mill.

Jouni Martiskainen

That stack gas contains CO2 at a concentration of approximately 15%, compared to roughly 400 parts per million in ambient air. That concentration is a byproduct of the process rather than any deliberate design, but it makes pulp mills among the most efficient biogenic CO2 concentrators in the industrial landscape, significantly reducing the energy and capital required to capture and purify that CO2 to near 100% concentration for storage or utilization downstream.

Rodrigo Marchi, Managing Director for the Americas at Suzano, framed his presentation around a central commercial argument: that eucalyptus-based hardwood pulp has moved well beyond its historical role as a cost-reduction tool and is now a performance fibre capable of helping customers compete on product quality.

Rodrigo Marchi

The presentation drew on Suzano’s experience working across tissue, packaging, and printing and writing grades, with a particular focus on substitution opportunities, the structural shift away from softwood, and what Marchi described as a deintegration strategy that is reshaping how some mills approach their fibre furnish. Marchi opened with the demand picture for hardwood pulp, noting the sustained growth trajectory that has characterized the segment over the past two decades, driven primarily by China.

Joaquín Kritz Lara, Chief Economist and Strategist with Numera Analytics, opened by noting that each year he focuses on a specific macro theme — tariffs the year prior, geopolitical risk the year before that. This year, he said, the answer was obvious: the conflict in the Middle East and its economic consequences, approached through two lenses — what it means for oil and gas markets, and how the broader economic fallout maps against the closest historical comparable, the stagflation episodes of the 1970s.

Joaquin Kritz Lara

On oil, Kritz Lara said the current situation is the worst energy crisis on record. He walked through the evolution of global oil production during previous major disruptions …before turning to the present. The current supply shortfall, depending on the estimates used, is running between 12% and 14% of global production. The only remotely comparable instance was the OPEC embargo of 1973, and even then it took close to two years for production to drop 10%. From a demand destruction perspective, he said, the current situation is comparable to COVID — and by his measure worse.

International Pulp Week opened Monday morning in Vancouver with Tim Brown, vice president with PPPC, welcoming delegates to the 21st edition of the conference. …Brown acknowledged the conference’s platinum sponsor, the Shanghai Port Authorities, and gold sponsors Suzano, UPM, and Svante, before outlining the program built around a central theme of fibre selection. He then handed the session over to Kevin Mason, Managing Director of ERA Forest Products Research, who served as both opening speaker and moderator for the day.

Kevin Mason

Mason opened with a framing device drawn from classical history. The post-1945 international order, he argued, can be understood as a Pax Americana — a system analogous to the Roman Empire’s Pax Romana, in which the dominant power’s global projection underwrote open trade flows, resource access, and the primacy of the US dollar in international commerce. That system, he said, is now over. In its place, he described a retreat toward hemispheric consolidation, which commentators have dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, or the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Whether by design or otherwise, the Trump administration’s actions represent a fundamental break from the institutions and norms established after 1945, with the UN, international courts, and a range of multilateral frameworks all, in Mason’s words, under attack. The operating logic, he suggested, is straightforward: the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must.