At the beginning of the year, suppliers and buyers on the French recovered paper market agreed on stable prices for all grades. The only downward adjustments were reported for the export sector. Yet, times are challenging both for waste management companies and merchants, who can only move their volumes with effort, and for the paper mills, which are struggling with weak orders in many segments and finding it almost impossible to predict their capacity utilisation in the coming weeks.
Domestic demand for ordinary grades of recovered paper was described as relatively weak or mediocre at best in January. French producers of corrugated case material had a poor order intake and little need for raw material, especially since some of them idled production over the year-end holidays and therefore had good stocks of recovered paper when the new year started. The downtimes in France had not been as extensive as those in Germany or Italy, for example, but some machines were halted and sometimes producers decided on short notice to extend the shutdowns longer than originally planned. Moreover, recovered paper buyers from Germany were largely absent or only offered low prices.
Some respondents said these factors theoretically could have led to a slight slide in the prices of ordinary grades in January. But this did not happen and mixed paper and board (1.02), supermarket paper and board (1.04) and old corrugated containers (OCC; 1.05) were sold at the same prices as in December. Once again, it was the Asian export business buoying prices. It also helped that recovered paper collections in January were quite low, said one respondent, explaining that arisings from commercial and industrial generators had dropped off considerably....
