Ilim Group participated in the XIX RISI International Containerboard Conference, which took place on November 13-15, 2019 in Miami.
Alexey Maslikov, Product Manager for Containerboard, spoke on the current development trends of the Russian P&P industry, as well as on Ilim’s plans and projects.
Presently, the demand for containerboard is growing both in Russia and worldwide. At the same time, virgin board is losing its share in the domestic market to testliner. “Overall in 2019, the total volume of the Russian market will increase by 3% to reach 3.5 million tons, with the testliner market share exceeding 70%”, said Alexey Maslikov.
The key focus of Ilim’s strategy is to expand its non-commodity exports, with China being the key market due to the growth of the virgin board demand triggered by the rapid growth of containerboard segment and tightening environmental regulations.
Ilim Group produces around 800 thousand tons of paperboard and other packaging materials, ranking 8th largest manufacturer of virgin containerboard. Implementation of Ilim’s large-scale investment program aimed at the capacity upgrade of its mills is expected to advance the Company to rank 7th globally. In autumn 2019, as part of this investment program, Ilim completed the KLB Line Rebuilt project in Bratsk (Irkutsk Oblast), which will increase annual production capacity of the mill by 50% up to 300 thousand tons. Ilim has also launched the project to construct a new pulp and paperboard mill in Ust-Ilimsk with a capacity of 600 thousand tons per year. Thus, by 2024 Ilim’s total annual paperboard output will reach 1.4 million tons.
Reference information:
Ilim Group is the largest pulp and paper company in Russia. Ilim Group has three pulp and paper mills, two modern corrugated box plants, and Sibgiprobum engineering and design institute.
Based on the 2018 results, the annual production output of Ilim Group exceeds 3.4 million tons of pulp and paper products, which are exported to more than 70 countries worldwide.
The XIX RISI International conference dedicated to the current state and outlook for global containerboard production was attended by more than 300 people. During the conference, 30 speakers from different countries spoke on several important industry-related topics, such as macroeconomic market outlook, key change drivers of the containerboard markets, packaging innovations, etc.