Surprisingly good demand combined with relatively limited supply on the corrugated case material market in France is boosting prices for brown grades.
Brown recycled corrugated case material manufacturers managed to push through the remainder of the mark-up they were seeking after only instituting a portion in October. Most prices in France increased again in November. Prices for white grades remained the same.
The combination of several factors is being singled out as the reason why prices managed to increase at all in a market climate that recently seemed to be influenced by subdued demand and rising manufacturing capacity. Paper producers pointed out that demand had picked up over the past couple of months. A few paper producers reported that order intake even exceeded their own production capacity at the moment.
Experts also pointed out that paper manufacturers had taken temporary downtime in a variety of cases, mostly for technical reasons, which has helped to ease the supply situation. Producers furthermore pointed to brisker demand from the Chinese export market and said that they had recently managed to boost exports to this country significantly.
