Ilim Group measures its performance in 2020. The Company retained leadership in the Russian pulp and paper industry by delivering 3.637 million tons of products, which is an all-time record performance.

In 2020, Ilim’s facilities produced 3.637 million tons of products, which is 12.7% or 409,000 tons above the last year’s performance. In particular, Ilim manufactured 2.2 million tons of pulp, 967,000 tons of packaging materials, 320,000 tons of white papers, and more than 120,000 tons of corrugated packaging. Driven by the growing demand for packaging both in the domestic and export markets, Ilim intends to aggressively increase its production of paperboard and packaging materials.

Despite the pandemic, last year the Company delivered its investment program worth more than USD 540.6 million. In particular, four new areas were placed into service: the debottlenecking of Line 1 of the Ust-Ilimsk Mill was completed with ramp-up to the target level and three projects were completed at the Bratsk Mill site, including construction of New Woodroom 4, construction of Vacuum Evaporation Plant 8, and KLB Line Rebuild with ramp-up to the target level, which increased the output of the Bratsk KLB machine by 50% to reach 300,000 tons.

In 2020, Ilim continued to implement its current key project – the Big Ust-Ilimsk. The project to set up a new kraft linerboard mill in Ust-Ilimsk entered an active phase with installation of the main equipment started in 2021. This year, a substantial portion of investments will be used to carry out the projects for construction of the new KLB mill in Ust-Ilimsk. Once fully ramped up, the KLB Mill will produce 600 thousand tons of containerboard per year. It will become the largest mill in terms of containerboard output in Russia and will make Ilim Group one of the largest manufacturers of unbleached packaging materials globally with a total output of 1.5 million tons of packaging materials per year.

Ilim posted revenue of USD 1,711.8 million in 2020. Profit before tax amounted to USD 16.6 million with net profit of USD 11.3 million. Ilim Group ranked 1st among the forest products companies in Russia in the annual Forbes rating.