Price development in the paper and packaging industry

TREND: INCREASING

The reasons are diverse, but the development is clear: The paper and packaging industry has been confronted for some time with drastically rising prices for raw materials, logistics and other areas. Supply bottlenecks even threaten to bring production to a standstill. At the same time, demand for many paper and packaging products is higher than ever. Especially in the area of shipping boxes and folding boxes (corrugated board and solid board), there are more and more material-related production losses.

FROM STRUCTURAL CHANGE TO THE PANDEMIC

The current situation for printers, publishers, packaging manufacturers and many others could be briefly and succinctly broken down to the following: Raw materials - i.e. paper, cardboard and pulp - are in short supply, which is why prices are rising.
 

In fact, according to the Federal Statistical Office, it is enormous:
 

• In wholesale, mixed waste paper cost more than three times more in September 2021 than in the same month a year earlier - an increase of 222.4 percent.

• The picture is similar for import prices: for waste paper they increased by 75 percent and for pulp by 45.7 percent in the same period.

1) Pandemic

The dislocations of the Corona pandemic within the industry are shown in many ways. Fewer advertisements and brochures in newspapers, for example, mean that there is less waste paper.

To this end, production capacities had to be cut back in many cases. This has also contributed to a shortage of raw materials. Supply chains and commodity cycles have been permanently disrupted as a result, and the effects are still continuing.

WHERE THE DEVELOPMENTS ARE PARTICULARLY NOTICEABLE

The portal ,,neue verpackung" has collected data from the Federal Statistical Office for various packaging raw materials in order to track the price development of the past years. Similar trends can be seen throughout:
 

• For all raw materials for packaging, the trend has been continuously rising since September 2020. This applies to paper, cardboard, corrugated board base paper and plastics.

• Corrugated paper and cardboard as packaging materials are, to a certain extent, an exception here, as prices for these products hardly fell at all in the period under review (from 2018 to summer 2021) and a significant increase in prices can only be observed since the beginning of 2021.

In the long term, this development is unlikely to slow down so quickly. This is because the problem of raw material shortages will remain in many areas of the industry for the time being. Solid board, corrugated board and recycled packaging from the two packaging materials are, after all, made from 100 percent waste paper - and that is hard to come by despite full order books.