Italy’s recovered paper market did not experience any wide-ranging changes in February. Exports have normalised somewhat after the initial shock sparked by the crisis in the Red Sea and demand in Italy remained generally subdued. Prices for ordinary recovered paper grades either stayed the same as in January or softened a little. Prices for all other grades were stable in February.
Italian paper mills continue to take downtime. Market players told EUWID that some machines making corrugated case material, coreboard and cartonboard stood idle again here and there in February, suggesting that ordering has not improved in these segments. Accordingly, demand for ordinary recovered paper grades on the domestic market remained fairly lacklustre in February. However, suppliers have come to terms with this situation, and some of them were not all that upset with order books, which they described as unchanged in most cases. Insiders only witnessed a slight improvement very occasionally.
The fact that demand in Italy was weak and that Far East exports have become more complicated in recent weeks as merchant ships are re-routed sent some prices for mixed paper and board (1.02), supermarket paper and board (1.04) and old corrugated containers (OCC; 1.05) falling . . .
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