In 2016, TWM visited a number of tissue mills from around the world – in Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, the US Northeast, Colombia and India – for the magazine’s Country Reports. Here, we revisit a selection to see what has changed.
VIETNAM
Jan/Feb 2016: Saigon Paper
Saigon Paper (SGP) has been consistently stepping forward to reinforce its number one position by market share in the Vietnam tissue market as well as actualising its ambition of being the number one player in ASEAN.
The company says it has maintained a ratio of export that makes up 30% of its capacity and aims to increase total export revenue by 200% in the next five years, with an annual growth rate from 30% up to 70%.
Among its objectives are developing export markets. In 2017, it celebrated its 20th year of establishment anniversary and stated its new vision: for SGP to become the market leader in ASEAN.
By obtaining and applying for international management certificates such as FSC, ISO 9001, ISO 50001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001, the company says it is proud that its products are accepted to export to the toughest markets such as Europe, America and Japan.
The company says its advantage is to make its products maintain a competitive price; it is its own agents collecting waste paper throughout the nation as well as maintaining a strong network over the world to be proactive in supplying production materials.
In 2016 – 2020, it will continue to upgrade its capacity of internal materials supply to satisfy 80% up to 100% of materials demand for production. Last year, it increased from four to seven stations which operated 24 hours daily.
Its diverse product portfolio includes industrial paper (testliner, chipboard, sizing medium and medium), semiproduct (parent jumbo roll) & finished product (toilet roll, facial tissue, kitchen towels, handkerchief, napkin, hand towels) in tissue which helps it serve various demands of export markets.
Asia including ASEAN and America are its potential export markets. In Asia including ASEAN, it is seeing fastgrowing demands with an average growth rate of 10% every year, helped by closer regional economic integration, large domestic markets and rising personal income.
In America, the business says it is already exporting to the country and that its large demand is “very attractive for our potential growth in revenue”.
JP Corelex Vietnam
When TWM met Masahiko Nagata, the Japanese general director of the Hanoibased recycling pioneer JP CORELEX VIETNAM in Vietnam at the start of 2017, the company was well placed for growth in its home and also nearby tissue markets.
Its 60,000m2 site is based 40km from Hanoi and is a joint venture, manufacturing 100% recycled tissue paper used to create toilet paper, facial, towel and napkin products. Most production is exported overseas as jumbo rolls.
The JP Corelex Group has mills in Hokkaido, Kanagawa and Shizuoka in Japan, where it established technologies for the recycling of difficult-to-regenerate wastepaper around 50 years ago. It now accounts for a large share of the recycled toilet roll market in Japan, helped by products such as coreless toilet roll.
Its Japanese market strategy and philosophies have been applied directly to its production site in Vietnam: “We brought the same system that we do in Japan here, so the quality is the same,” he says.
Vietnam’s potential tissue market remains very clear: it still has a young and growing population of nearly 90m, a steadily increasing economy buoyed by foreign investments and exports, and rapidly changing demographics that are seeing its rural population becoming increasingly urbanised and moving to cities. However, Nagata says that for the time being, he doesn’t feel that Vietnam domestic household paper consumption is increasing.