Strategies for Bleached Market Pulp Producers, 1992 TAPPI Conference Proceedings

New market pressures call for new strategies. Innovative, tailor-made strategies include both industry-wide changes and producer-specific planning and investment approaches.

High brightness high yield pulps, filler and coating pigments, and, most of all, recycled fibres have been infringing increasingly on the historical dominance of bleached kraft market pulps.

The market-driven demand for "chlorine-free" pulps has been intensifying the technological and economic pressures on market pulp producers. Forecasts predict that these trends will continue and result in significant changes in the furnish composition and specifications of papers and boards.

The innovative investment and marketing strategies of a few companies have been unable to prevent the feast to famine cycles of market pulp prices and the resultant up and down in profitability of the industry.

Background information on supply and demand, prices and costs, is given to set the stage for a discussion of the market-focused driving forces for market pulp producers.