Hello Print fans!

I Know I have been away for a while now. There are all sorts of excuses that I could come up with, but I have never held much faith in excuses with other people, so I don’t see why it should be any different here.

So let me start by saying Sorry and Welcome Back to our Blog!!!

Unfortunately for my first blog of the year I have some bad news.

I had recently received a letters from all the paper mills across the world that we use; from Holland to Finland they all had bad news for me.

Several Factors have come together to force the price of raw wood pulp up and this has led to an increase in the cost of paper.

There are many factors that are contributing to this, but I wanted to discuss the main ones with you.

1)       The tragic 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile, (the country strongest in 50 years) a few months ago has had a massive impact on raw wood pulp.  The epicentre of the earthquake was next to the country’s central southern region which is where the majority of pulp-makers are located.  Multiple mills were taken out of action and so were their relevant ports, this has lead to a massive drop in the amount of raw wood pulp that is available.

2)       The second factor is the Strikes in Finland. Workers at many of the ports in Finland have been striking. And this has led to exports from Finland being cut by 90%. Even though this has now been resolved it will probable be several months before the supply is back to normal.

Now before I go on to discuss the other problems there are some things worth mentioning. Together Chile and Finland account for 12% of the world’s wood pulp sales. Loosing production from both of these countries has had a major impact, (in fact in Europe the price of raw wood pulp has risen to $875.62 a ton within 7 days. This is the biggest seven-day increase in almost 6 years, and we predict that the price will top $1000.00 a ton before this is finished.)

3)       The last factor that is contributing to this is the voracious appetite for raw wood pulp in China and the Far Eastern Markets. The are contracting to take wood pulp directly from the suppliers at higher prices that their European Counterparts and this drives prices up across the world.

To give you and idea of what the market look like, a few weeks ago in March a Chinese paper mill introduced Asia’s biggest price increase ever! They raised the price of one of their papers form $150.00 per ton to $1050.00 per ton. At the moment paper economists are unclear whether the price hike will stick.

I don’t want any of our customers to worry about our own prices just yet. We have stayed in close contact with the various paper mills that we use and for the moment our prices will not be changing.

Unfortunately I can’t promise that our prices won’t change in the future; But I can promise to do my best to make sure any price increases are relatively minor, I have also started looking for alternatives to wood pulp paper and I will updated this blog with any suitable alternatives that I find as I find them.

These factors are combining together to create a “Perfect Storm.” There’s not much availability of fibre in other parts of the northern Hemisphere, so for the moment there is little choice but to try and whether the storm out.