Good morning. Morning. Hello, everyone. It's really great to have all of you here. So thank you for coming to spend the morning with us. This will be a great chance, and for me, it's my first Suzano Day to share with you. And this is our agenda: to share with you our strategy, also the main initiatives that we are putting in place to implement the strategy. And of course, we will also share with you our financial management. So let me first show here our strategic avenues. And I'm sure that most of you are already familiar with this slide. What I'm showing here since today, we have decided to focus on three of these strategic avenues. We will talk about our initiatives, what we are doing, and then after this Cerrado Project, to keep reducing our cost.
What's the main initiatives that we're going to put in place to keep enhancing our competitive advantage, our competitive position in the business? We will also share with you during the presentation, I'll say, a very pragmatic balance of supply and demand. And this is mainly for the next five years and how this will impact in our, I'll say, relevance, how do we keep our relevance in the market pulp. And on the other block, which is related to how do we allocate our capital, I have to say that to understand the capital allocation, to understand the strategy of the capital allocation, we must understand the competitive environment. And what do we see in the competitive environment right now, which has been changing, in our view? The first one is more integration in China.
The second element that we are already seeing is not integration, but consolidation and specialization in the value chain in the western part of the world, I say, Europe and U.S. And finally, the third one that we cannot forget, that is the announcement of new projects in Brazil. We can discuss here the timeline of those, but to be very honest, it doesn't matter. In the next five, 10 years, we will have more hardwood concentration production in South America. So this is the competitive environment. So although I would like to take this opportunity to reinforce that we will not implement in our strategy any sizable movement in terms of inorganic growth in our business. We do not have in the pipeline in the coming years any transformation deal. So there's a lot of things to do. There's a lot to implement. We are analyzing opportunities.
But we consider, for instance, that the recent deals that we made, like Pine Bluff in U.S. and also Lenzing in Europe, are very. I'll say, healthy balance between what we consider risk management and growing abroad. So those are the three elements that we would like to address during the presentations that the management team will do today. And to start, I would like to invite Caroline , that will cover safety and people. Caroline is our Vice President for People, Future, Communication, and Safety. So I'll hand over to Caroline. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Beto. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. So can you share with me so I can answer the slide? So talking about safety first, because our culture drivers, our people drive our culture, and safety is very important to us. We are already benchmarked in safety in our industry, in our pulp and paper industry. And we target to increase in 2030 to be benchmarked in the industry in general. I also would like to talk about our commitment to leadership development. Leadership development is very important to us. I'm glad to share that our employees are very satisfied with their development and career opportunities. And our numbers even grow in 2024.
Also, when you talk about engagement, and as you can see in the bottom of the page, our levels of engagement of our employees are very high and are even higher than the market average. So also, I would like to take advantage of being here with you today to talk about our approach in our people management area in our internationalization. We have two main focuses. One, value our local teams and their culture. And second, it's very important for us taking our leaders who know our excellence, our operational excellence, and take that to the locations of our assets, of our locations abroad. And last but not least, I also would like to talk about gender diversity with you. We know that our industry have mainly male leaders. And we are very committed with leadership development and gender diversity in our leadership positions.
We have a target to have 30% of women leaders in leadership positions by next year. As you can see our trends, we are improving year after year. And I would like to share with you two main actions that we are doing that are very powerful to have these positive trends. The first one is that all our bonus are linked to increasing women in leadership positions. And second, we have a very strong program to accelerate women in also leadership positions. So with that strategy, that people strategy that we are very proud of, I would like to close my presentation and invite my dear colleague Carlos Aníbal to be here with you.
Thanks, Carol. We are all very glad of those achievements. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure. I'm happy to be here again for one more Suzano Day. We're going to start the best in class in total pulp cost chapter, sharing with you our vision on what we believe to be the major challenges being faced by any forestry business, any forestry operations in Brazil nowadays. But not only that, what we at Suzano, what we are doing to overcome all that, what we are doing to win in a very challenging environment. The first one is eucalyptus availability, limited availability. And you guys, we remember last year, I began my presentation with a provocation. Will there be enough wood? Wood has been, and will remain a very scarce resource, even more in the future.
To manage that, to tackle that in an effective way, we are increasing our self-sufficiency. We are reducing our exposure to the spot markets. Labor shortage, that has been a growing issue in Brazil. That has been a headache in some regions. What we are doing, we are investing in mechanization. We are investing in automation in our silviculture practices. Logistics. Logistics has been a very important component of our wood cost, very important, and that has become even more important lately with all the labor, all the equipment inflation. What we are doing structurally, we are reducing our distance, our radius between our Euca farms and our pulp mills, reducing structurally our radius. Last but not least, important, climate impact, climate uncertainties, climate change, and that has been in the center of our operational agenda.
Every Suzano Forest Operations colleague, they start their working day with two goals in mind, two goals. What are you going to do to produce more wood per hectare? What are you going to do to produce more wood per hectare? And how are we going to do that? Reducing the radius between our Euca farms and our mills. I'll bring you a very recent and updated and actual example that reflects that. Climate change and more Euca wood per hectare. All of us read, all of us heard about what has taken place in 2024 on fires. Knowing that in advance, using climate models, we began to prepare ourselves to that scenario earlier this year, investing in people training in our fire brigades.
Combining all that with monitoring power control, with satellite images, and using a lot of digital, of AI intelligence, we have had a remarkable year in 2024. In a very, very challenging scenario, we are able to reduce the area impacted by fires in almost 40%. We need action on that. We need action on that response time, which is the time between the moment that we hear about or identify the fire, and we are there to fight that, only 30 minutes. But this is what we are doing to protect our forest assets. What we are doing to generate more Euca wood per hectare. We have a very solid, a very robust plan that is in the heart of every single Suzano Forest Operation employee. And we call that the Billion Forest, or in Portuguese, Floresta do Bilhão. And why is that?
Every additional one cubic meter per hectare per year that we generate brings us a NPV, a net present value of BRL 1 billion. I'm going to repeat that. One cubic meter per hectare per year means a NPV of BRL 1 billion. And we have a very ambitious plan for the coming years. We want to increase our MAI, our yield, in a number between 7% and 13% by 2034. How to do that? Improving operations, improving silviculture, and always, always bringing new genetic material, new clones that will grant us a higher productivity. What is new here? Cutting-edge technology that we are bringing to our forestry. Our forest operations deploy cutting-edge technology. We are moving from a model where we follow the forest growth by sampling. We are moving that to a digital model. Now we have a kind of big brother following our forest development.
We have a kind of online, real-time management to follow the way that our forest is growing. That will give us an early response to address unexpected events. So whenever we do, we have an unexpected situation, we can be faster, earlier, we can identify that and take actions to fix it, to manage that. Labor shortage. Today, we stand with a mechanization index in our silviculture practice in about 58%. By 2030, we want to reach 85%. Once we do that, we're going to reduce our labor intensity in about 40%. We're going to reduce our labor intensity in our silviculture activities in about 40%. How to do it? New equipment, new technology. I'm going to share with you a very nice update, very nice event. We are starting georeference each seedling of our forest.
So when we plant a new seedling, we're going to be able to georeference that seedling. So we're going to know exactly the XY position of that new tree. This is a fantastic improvement. And we are using Suzano Venture Capital in that initiative. We are using Suzano Venture Capital to speed up, to work closer with the AgTechs. That has been a remarkable achievement as well. So this is technology on the mechanical side. What is missing here? A lower radius. So our expected number for 2024 is 186 km. And we want to bring that by late this decade, early next one, to around 150. That means, ladies and gentlemen, almost BRL 500 million per year when we bring the radius from 186 to 150. And we are doing that, as I said before, increasing our self-sufficiency.
We are combining again those two goals that I mentioned in the beginning of my presentation: lower CapEx and growing self-sufficiency. On the forestry CapEx side, over the last few years, we have planted a lot. We have planted to expand our forest bases. We have planted to begin creating optionalities for our future. We have planted more to create in some regions a buffer in case we have to deal with a more adverse weather scenario, and in that chart, you can see the difference between what we harvest in the bottom line and what we plant in the upper line, so 2025 is going to be pretty much the same, but as you can see here, from 2026 onwards, we will be equalizing planted and harvest area, meaning that we should expect a lower CapEx. Let me bring you a concrete example that reflects all that.
That example is Mato Grosso do Sul, where we have Ribas and Três Lagoas. The green curve is a distribution curve for our forest planted more than three years ago. The orange or the brown one are the forests that we planted in the last two or three years. As you can see here, for those younger forests, we already show an improvement, a growth of our MAI in 15%. We are increasing in Mato Grosso do Sul our MAI in 15% in those forests that we planted in the last two or three years. In Ribas do Rio Pardo, we have established our structural Euca farm bases. Fully established, we began a fantastic operation with our forest bases fully established. Not only that, we have a goal with a decrease in radius that we reach 65 km later this decade.
We are bringing, we are increasing our mechanization level in our silviculture in that area. And as I said before, we are bringing better and more productive genetic material. Wood cash cost, Q3 24, 100 basis points, we are planning to bring that late this decade, early next one, with a reduction of around 35%. With that, I finished my presentation inviting my colleague Aires Galhardo, who brilliantly led our Cerrado Project. So Aires, straight from Ribas for Suzano Day.
Thank you, Carlos. After this warm introduction, let me share that last year I requested to present before you. Hi, guys. Good morning. My name is Aires Galhardo. I'm an Executive Vice President, industrial engineer and energy, and I lead the Cerrado Project. The delivery of a project with a magnitude of Cerrado involves several types of complexity. It was not trivial to implement it on time and on budget.
Throughout the project execution period, a global environment, for example, posed significant risks, both in relation to the budget and the timeline. Remember the global reality that I'm referring to. We started our projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. The war in Ukraine affected some of our suppliers. And we had to face logistics restrictions in the supply chain, among other examples. And we overcame all these challenges. Inside the fence, there were also different challenges to be managed. Of course, in this case, mostly operational, related with the scale of a project never before executed in the pulp and paper sector, given that we are talking about the largest single pulp mill in the world. And to provide you a better understanding of what this means, I share with you some curiosities about the Cerrado Project that represent the dimension of this execution.
We had over 45,000 workers during the execution of the project, 45,000 different workers, accounting for over 56 million man-hours worked inside the fence. We used enough steel to build more than eight Eiffel Towers on the site and enough concrete to build almost five Maracanã Stadiums. These are just a few examples of how complex it is to manage a project of this size. A project of this scale has an estimated learning curve of nine months, as far as I know. In the Q3 2024 conference call, we showed to the market that we had reached 8% of the learning curve at the end of the quarter, exceeding the 71% forecast. Now I bring more good news for our investors. Ribas continues to exceed our initial forecasts and quality.
Therefore, we are confident in stating that the completion of the learning curve will be reached within six months. It means that at the end of January 2025, we will be running our new facility fully established as we planned. This means that in 2025, we will have a production gain of 77,000 tons that will become sales in next year. Once again, Suzano shows its ability to successfully deliver complex projects and its commitment to maximize value creation. Ribas has two main pillars of competitiveness: forest, explained by Carlos, and energy sales. Let me share with you Suzano's long-term energy strategy. Suzano has a surplus of approximately 108 MW average of energy in Ribas. We decide to deliver part of the surplus to our chemical plants inside the fence, ensuring lower and stable prices of our inputs for the long term.
The second part, 50 MW, we sold to the regulated market at an excellent price under our long-term contract. Finally, the third part, the remaining 55 MW, we kept for spot sale to the regulated market. This combination will bring an excellent cost reduction to Ribas. Ribas' competitiveness is our edge guaranteed. Considering these assumptions of BRL and FX, at the Q3 2024, cash cost as a baseline, we already see a 30% reduction of the average Ribas cash cost in 2025, mainly coming from lower input price, higher energy sales, and fixed cost dilution. When you reach the structural cash cost, especially mainly in the forest with 65 km average distance between forest and mill, after, in 2032, after the first cycle of the forest, the mill will have a cash cost of approximately $100 per ton.
Consider the current level of FX. The cash cost in the plant will be even less than $100 per ton. Now, I take this opportunity. I know that part of you will be at the site tomorrow, but other parts no, and share with you a small video about the Cerrado Project.
One, two, three. The future has begun now, here, before our very eyes. It has just been born, and it is already big, very big, as big as a hundred-year-old story that remains fresh and new, starting and restarting futures for a better tomorrow. Full of life and transformation, in the heart of the Cerrado, the idea was planted, and the seed grew to bear fruit. The largest ever seen. From the whitest smile of a job well done to the largest, yes, the largest single-line pulp mill in the world.
Three years ago, we took our first steps. We forged paths. People from near, far, and everywhere joined hands in a shared commitment to make reality happen, and today, it is ready to bring the world the grit and determination cultivated in each of us. You don't have to go far to see the change, the magnitude of the impact, the growth, the countless portraits of lives transformed by our arrival. Jobs, new businesses, people teaching, men learning. Everything grew and took shape. The city changed. The state changed. The world changed, and today, they count on our strength, our capacity, our innovation. We are ready, more than ever, filled with a desire to achieve. We are grateful for so much professionalism, hands-on work, and the camaraderie of those who believed alongside us and now see it happening after so much courage and respect.
Nurturing dedication and unity, it's time to harvest a new beginning. One, two, three. The future has already begun. Suzano, we plant the future.
Then, just to reinforce, consider our distance between forest and mill. Consider our strategy of energy surplus in the Cerrado. Consider Suzano's track records of delivering complex projects. Consider our knowledge in the other 12 mills that we have. Suzano is a difficult project to be replicated. It's a case of a unique project that we have the opportunity to build. And Suzano's investment decisions in Cerrado based on the view of demand, hardwood pulp in the world. And to share our vision with you, I invite my colleague Leo to present. Leo, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Aires. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, good evening for those who are following us virtually. Actually, this project is amazing. We have been there last week with a very big group of our customers, global customers, more than 50 of them from almost 20 countries. And they have seen the immensity of the forestry, which Carlos mentioned, the immensity of the industrial site and logistics solutions. It's just impressive, and they were very glad to be part of the Suzano ecosystem and eager to buy more Suzano pulp.
So during today's presentations, I'm going to tackle with you guys four main points. First, I'm going to review and update our S&D scenario for hardwood for the next five years. Then I'm going to go deep in terms of the opportunity that we have been sharing in fiber substitution with several additional examples to previous presentations. Third, there will be some headwinds during these next five years, and I'm going to share with you our view on those headwinds.
Last but not least, there are upside risks to the S&D fundamentals, which I will also tackle during my presentation. First, starting with demand and with organic demand, we have a constructive view, as Aires mentioned. Our view is that the market will grow roughly five million tons in terms of hardwood demand in the next five years. This is mainly supported by three paper grades that grow at a CAGR of over 3%, and that's forecasted to continue growing at this rate, which are paperboard, tissue, and specialty papers. Very interesting to see that as per our forecast by 2028, tissue will now exceed 50% in terms of hardwood demand or the representation of it in the form of hardwood demand.
And specialty grades, which had a much lower representation a decade ago, will exceed 20%, being over or representing a bigger chunk in terms of demand in printing and writing grades. Looking at fiber-to-fiber, we are mainly analyzing what is the rhythm of advance of hardwood grades over softwood grades in this bleached chemical Pulp arena. So we are updating the chart that we have showed last year. We now reach 63% share on the bleached chemical Pulp market, 63%. But this is not the more important information. What we have been observing is the rhythm of this growth. Historically, not too far ago, hardwood would gain over softwood an average of 0.5 or 0.6 percentage points every year.
During these last three years, this rhythm or the speed of advance over softwood has intensified and now averages 1.3 percentage points per year, as you are seeing on the graph. Is this the new pattern, or would it be even higher and at a bigger pace than what we're observing? To go even deeper into fiber-to-fiber, we're going to share with you a complex slide. So I'm going to first explain how it works. For each one of the four paper grades, which bring demand to pulp and to hardwood pulp, we are bringing what is the current share of hardwood in the bleached chemical pulp consumption. So in this case, for tissue, they use, or the producers globally use, 66% hardwood and the remaining percentage softwood. Then we bring right next to it the region in the world that has the highest utilization mix of hardwood.
Then the third bar, the region of the world that has the lowest so that we can compare. By no means do we want to show or anchor that what you see here on the highest is where we see the potential. As you know, in Brazil, Suzano and our customers in Brazil, we produce absolutely every one of these grades with 100% eucalyptus hardwood pulp. So our view is much bigger than the higher limits that you see here. Sharing now all paper grades, we see that in some of those, the region that's lagging compared to the region that's leading is almost double the difference or the percentage of hardwood compared to softwood. So the potential is very big. Another way to analyze the potential is giving a sensitivity analysis showing the following.
So here, what we're doing is for each one of these grades, if the global share of hardwood increases one percentage point in five years, meaning 0.2% a year, one percentage point in five years, what would be the consequent additional demand for hardwood pulp? So just to analyze tissue, in the global analysis, if hardwood increases from 66% to 67%, an additional demand on top of the organic demand of 1.6 million tons will arise. This is to show the size of the opportunity, the amazing opportunity that there is in terms of fiber substitution. Another way to analyze this is looking at the supply side of softwood. We have presented this graph last year. Now it's updated with full 2023 and 2024 numbers.
What we do here is in blue, we track all the new projects that were announced and that have gone live in terms of softwood. In orange, we announced permanent closures in that specific year. Then these numbers derive a net change, which in the case of softwood is negative. It's negative 3.2 million tons in the last five years, which simply disappeared from the market. This obviously is due to factors, as you know, such as higher technical age of equipment, availability of wood, or lack of availability of wood, and higher costs of their production sites. Consequently, the price gap between the fibers is getting bigger and bigger with time. Today, we're reaching a new record, which will incentivize further fiber substitution. We could choose to sit down and wait for change to happen. It will happen. We could choose to be passive to it and wait.
But we have decided to lead change and to be protagonists on this change. And how did we do that? We have created an ecosystem inside Suzano to support our customers in this fiber transitioning journey. The first part of this ecosystem is we have inside Suzano an education team, which is available to be close to our customers and their technicians, explaining more and more about the properties of our fiber and how to better utilize our fibers. Second, and very important, development and technology services. This is a team that is engaging in projects with customers that will help customers to increase levels of hardwood by different refining techniques, by different blendings with their current or eventually even new pulp supply, alternative pulp supply, and also in terms of cost reduction and energy reduction.
This same team is also supporting our customers to test, first in pilot plants and then in their industrial sites, and then utilize the new products that we are bringing to our portfolio. We have made operational on an industrial scale in 2024 two very important products. One is the EucaStrong, and the other one is the EucaPack. Both of these products have properties that are closer and closer to softwood grades and will enhance and facilitate fiber transition. Last but not least, application service. Every one of our international offices has an outpost technical customer service team and application engineering team to support our customers on their weekly or even daily agendas in terms of testing and fiber substitution. Consequently, engagement has been huge.
We tracked in the last year among our top customers by region how many of them are engaged already in specific projects with this team to foster fiber substitution. And levels are extremely high, as you see, 60%, 70%, 80%, depending on the region of the world. However, we see some headwinds to our model in the next five years, and we recognize these headwinds, sorry. And these headwinds are coming from verticalization in China, as Beto mentioned in his opening speech. In these next three years, there are a couple of projects that are being deployed or are expected to be deployed. And these projects, if we analyze it under a pulp producer's point of view, have a negative, an uncertain, and a positive point of view. The negative, obviously, is that they are going to compete against our customers.
As they are verticalized, once they compete, they are going to reduce eventually the operating rates of our customers and therefore reduce the demand of hardwood pulp. The uncertainty, always in China, very hard to establish when is the accrual, when is the startup dates, what is the learning curve, and most important, what are the operating rate levels of these projects that are presented here in full production capacities. The positive, again, from a pulp production point of view, is that absolutely all of these projects will be on the last quartile in terms of cost compared to their global peers and competitors, all of them. Today, as we speak, some of you know that one of the leading Chinese producers integrated with pulp and paper, which produces over seven million tons of pulp and paper, today has completely ceased production, completely ceased production as we speak.
This shows that eventually models of verticalizing in high-cost regions are not that successful. Even so, we have factored that in our models. This is our model for demand for 2028. Again, adding organic demand, adding a very conservative view on fiber to fiber. If you do calculations on any of the slides I shared with fiber to fiber, the number is much bigger than this one. This is a very conservative view on fiber to fiber. That's why we put an additional fiber to fiber on the right. And then also admitting that headwinds from verticalization will eat part of this additional demand for pulp. Therefore, in our view, we forecast three million tons of additional demand in the next five years. On the supply side of the equation, we added all the upcoming projects in hardwood, like Suzano Ribas.
We considered also the already known projects that we modeled in terms of conversions to other grades, like Suzano Limeira, which will be converted next year to fluff grades. Based on that, our expectation is that the supply side of the equation, the supply addition, the net supply addition will be roughly 6 million tons during these next five years. Here are the main projects, both in terms of new and upcoming volumes and as well conversions. With that said, when we compare and forecast the additional demand, already considering these headwinds and the addition of supply, we have a demand-to-capacity ratio, which we open year by year, which is a bit more challenging than it has been on the last one, two, three years. Usually, when this rate is below 90%, 91%, we see more challenging markets. That's our forecast for these next five years.
We're going to navigate a bit more challenging markets. However, as usual, we do not include in our forecast the unplanned shutdowns or commercial shutdowns to market. The permanent closures are indeed considered, obviously, but the unplanned, unexpected downtimes are not included, and as you are seeing on the graph, they have been increasing in size and volume with time. Just last week, we got news of one of the major North American softwood mills, producers almost one million tons, who are having mechanical problems and running at a much reduced operating rate, and this has become more and more often in our market during these past years. To conclude my presentation, as always, we are bringing our view on the marginal cash cost for next year, and why is that?
Because we see marginal cash cost as a very good fundamental or grounding for what eventually a price value can be. We have updated these numbers together with one of the leading consulting companies, and our forecast is that that marginal cash cost in 2025 will be a bit lower than what it is this year, roughly $560 per ton. And sharing a different view on it, at today's China peak price, reported price, price where the transactions in China are going on, of $546, there are in the world 3 million tons of market pulp, hardwood market pulp production, which is underwater. 3 million tons as we speak. So obviously, 3 million tons underwater. And that scenario, which I presented on the last slide, of consecutive years of a demand-to-capacity ratio below 91% is unsustainable. Markets should reshuffle. Markets should rebalance.
With that said, I would now like to invite Fábio to share with us his view on the paper and packaging side of our business. Thank you.
Thank you, Leo. Good morning, folks. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Let's change gears now and talk a little bit about our business downstream, paper and packaging business unit. This year, it's a special year for Suzano. We're celebrating our 100th anniversary. It's also a special year for our business unit with the acquisition of the business that we just announced in October. And I'm here today to talk to you about what we're doing to keep generating value for Suzano in this business, as you know, that faces headwinds in terms of demand creation, especially for print and writing paper grades. So I brought here for you first slide.
We took a period of years from 2017 until today. We divided this in pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic. You have our EBITDA chart on here during these three periods of time. And as you can see, we have changed the path or the level of EBITDA generation for this business, even though in that time period, 30% of demand has shrunk in print and writing paper grades. This is global print and writing global demand. And also here in Brazil, that used to be a market that was growing and now has also demand, which is shrinking year- over- year. So our business was capable of increasing the value that we bring to Suzano, even though we have these headwinds in terms of demand. How we're doing that, that's what I'm going to be sharing with you today here. We're doing that, bringing the cost down of the business.
We are already very competitive, but we're working to be even more competitive over time. We're doing by expanding our product portfolio, moving into packaging grades. I'm going to be sharing with you some of the initiatives that we're doing in that aspect. And we are also working on our go-to-market strategy. You know, part of that, I'm going to be sharing with you what we're doing on top of what we already shared last year here. So moving on, I have a good example here of what we do in terms of reducing the cost down of our business. This is a project that we're doing now at Limeira Mill, and we have projects like that going through other mills in the paper and packaging business unit as well. This is a project that we are revisiting all the energy efficiency of the mill.
So we invested BRL 300 million in 18 months. This project is going to generate a reduction in the cash cost, not only of the mill, but also for the entire business unit of BRL 30 per ton, which is sizable for our business unit, while also helping us with sustainability because this project is going to reduce the emissions of 25,000 tons of CO2 equivalent in a given year. So a double dip for Suzano with this project. The second thing that I'd like to share with you is about our go-to-market strategy. You all know about Suzano Plus in our go-to-market that we have implemented here in Brazil, where we advance in the value chain selling to smaller customers directly without any intermediary. We are also, what we're doing now, we're expanding that.
We call it Suzano Plus 3.0 to Latin and also the United States, where we approach more customers. And while doing that, we also increase the profitability with the business model. So in one year of that experiment, we have already doubled the amount of customers that we have in Latin and also in the United States, as you can see here on the screen, with more profitability per ton when supplying to these customers. So the next thing here, it's about product portfolio. As you can see here, you know, most of the products that we produce today are still in the print and writing category. And the print and writing category, folks, the trend for demand here, it's negative in the next years. That's not going to change. We don't see also an acceleration of demand destruction here.
So it's kept steady at this pace for the next years, while we see growth in the packaging grades in terms of demand for the next years. So what can be done in Suzano that we were very focused in print and writing in terms of how can we have more products into the packaging segment, which is growing? First thing we're doing, we took all our assets. We're looking at the assets that we have today. What can be done without major investments? So we worked with R&D to develop products that we can put in our machines that occupy the space of these machines.
Today, replacing the tail curve that we have in terms of profitability of print and writing products, uncoated woodfree, that otherwise we would be exporting at very low prices, and having new products come into place that bring us higher profitability, lower cost of production, and one good example here is a Kraft liner, a white top liner Kraft liner that introduced Suzano in the containerboard market. It's a product that we have launched in the last two years. It's a very successful one. We have very good feedback from customers in the domestic market and also in export, and we're growing. We're selling about 50,000 tons of this product already this year. We have a very higher objective for next year in terms of growth for this product.
And this product brings us a much higher profitability when compared to the uncoated woodfree that we would have produced if we didn't have introduced this product to our portfolio. A second thing that we have done, you know that we have acquired some assets in the United States that help us to expand our product portfolio in packaging to almost 40% in the total of papers that Suzano is producing. So this is a first move. And I'm going to be talking in the next two slides more details about this move that we have done. So you got a new acquisition price, $80 million. This is an adjustment after the working capital adjustments on the price that we have announced, about $100 million.
So with the acquisition of the assets in Arkansas and North Carolina, we acquired 420,000 tons of paperboard, integrated, fully integrated with pulp production in the state of Arkansas. And the state of Arkansas, folks, is a state that has today a surplus of wood. Only 50% of the pine-grown forests in the state are being consumed. So it has lots of potential in terms of future growth. It's a good wood basket in terms of quality of the wood. Now we can say we've been there for 70 days now. So we're falling in a very cost-competitive wood basket as well. Very strategically located. Logistics-wise, we have two rail systems that reach the mill directly inside the mill. We have a barging system at the river that can be used. And we also have good trucking connections throughout the United States.
With the acquisition, we also received some seven extruders that allow us to offer products to food service and also cupstock markets, which are sizable in the United States. We have now the largest concentration of extrusion capacity, more than what we can produce in terms of paper in the country. As you know, in this mill, there are two paper machines. One is running. The other one is idle, so we're going to be discussing what we can do regarding this paper machine, which is idle, and we have a very good product. I've been there. I've just moved to Arkansas. I'm living there, living the daily life at the mill. The quality of the product that we produce there is very good. I can assure you that.
In a market which is growing, as you can see here, the demand for growth, it's positive in the next years. I'm going to share with you now what we're going to do with these assets. Okay? We have a three-phase plan that we shared with every single employee at the mill. We were well received. We had a very smooth transition between Pactiv and Suzano. We were well received for the people in the mill and also in the communities around the mill. We shared this plan in three phases. The phases here are the difference between is just the time for maturity. We are working on these three phases as we speak in parallel. Phase number one. Phase number one is the phase that we're going to be attacking all the issues that we have with the mill today.
The previous owner was looking towards more on the converting piece of the business that he had. They didn't pay much attention to the infrastructure and how to run the paper and pulp mills. So Suzano, as my colleague Aires showed to you today, we're good in running paper and pulp mills. We have a good track record. So we're focusing right now in increasing the operating stability of the mill and having this mill more stable, reducing cost and producing more products. We also initiated a turnaround in the commercial contracts that we have with our customers. So most of the contracts were expired during this year. So we took the opportunity to renegotiate these contracts at a better pricing rate. And I'm glad to share with you that we've been successful so far. We've negotiated 100% of these contracts with a better pricing that starts next year.
And we are also looking at ways of expanding our sales into cupstock and food service, moving a little bit away from liquid packaged board, which was the main target for this mill up to now. In the second phase, we started looking at structural projects that will reduce substantially the cash cost that we have in the mill today. We have already mapped a big list of projects that we're going to be executing in the next two years. We have enough products to be executing in 2025, 2026. That's going to help us increase the productivity, bring cash costs down. And these are technological approach guides that we have been using in our mills here in Brazil. So things that we're not talking about the complex things here, just bolt-on projects with a medium-sized CapEx that we can apply and to reduce the cost.
We're also looking for ways to increase the production of pulp and also paper at these mills. We're going to be also experimenting with fiber-to-fiber, as Leonardo pointed out. There's an opportunity here. Hardwood in this area is more expensive than softwood. It's different than what we are used to see here in our market. There's an opportunity for us here to apply our pulp there in some of the recipes that we are producing in the products and also helping us to look at opportunities for the paper machine number one, which is idle since 2021. The last one, the third phase here, goes aligned with what Aires just mentioned. We're going to be looking at feasibility studies to dramatically increase the amount of product that we produce at this mill.
Pulp, paper, or pulp could be fluff pulp or could be paper-grade pulp. Based on the preliminary information that we have from the mill about its competitiveness, the wood basket, energy, we believe there's feasibility for us in moving this project around, and that comes in alignment with what we are trying to do with paper and packaging in the future. This is our first step. We didn't acquire this mill to keep it at 420,000 tons. We didn't move into the United States to keep our packaging business at 420,000 tons. We have a much higher ambition in order to grow the business there, organically or inorganically. We want to be a sizable player, and what we have seen so far at this mill in the last 70 days gives us courage and confidence that we could be very optimistic about the future.
Just to finalize here, these are the objectives that we want: increase production, reduce fixed costs and variable costs, and with that, better price, mix, and margin. I want to tell you that, as you saw, the acquisition price is a very low ticket, very large area. We're talking about 21 sq km at the area of this mill. It's a very robust infrastructure. So we have space to grow there. Everything that we're going to be doing is according to the plan that we had done prior to the acquisition. So we didn't see any surprises in these first 70 days that forced us to change the plan. So everything is moving according to the plan. The CapEx allocated for us to do this phase I and phase II of this plan here, it's a CapEx which is not material. It's going to impact Suzano.
So it's a CapEx which is a good-sized CapEx and included in the plan that we have announced to the market. With that, I want to invite my colleague Luís Bueno to talk to us about consumer goods.
Thanks, Fábio. Thanks, Fábio. And congratulations for the improvements in the paper and packaging business. Good morning, everyone. I'm Luís Bueno, responsible for the consumer goods division. And I'm going to share with you our plan for the future. We have recently finished our synergies programs after the KC acquisition that we've done last year. And the amount captured was far beyond our original estimates. And this value is widespread in different areas of the company. With those synergies and the combination of these two companies, it enhanced our competitive advantage in the market. As I'm going to share with you, we've gained market share in the last year and increased our market leadership with 24% market share. Highlights for the south and southeast regions with higher growth that we had. After this acquisition, we also had a very good increase in the distribution network.
We have now 94% weighted distribution. This means that our products are present and sold in pretty much all of the major retailers in the country. And no other company in our industry has a weighted distribution this big. The third point that I'm going to mention with you is the cash cost that we had in the Mogi mill. The Mogi mill was the mill that we acquired from KC. And we were able to reduce the cash cost by 46%. And I'm going to repeat that. We were able to reduce the cash cost by 46% within six months of the acquisition. When we see those results, it gives us the confidence to keep investing and growing this business. Last year, we introduced it here, the startup, the initial project for our 70th plant in Aracruz. The project is developing very well.
We are here to announce that we are going to be able to anticipate the startup for the Q4 of 2025. This project has an 18% internal rate of return, way above the WACC of the company. With Aracruz, we will have seven plants spread out in the country. This national footprint of plants, which no other company in our industry has, will allow us to better serve our clients in terms of service level and also distribution costs. To be able to see how it plays together, let's watch a quick video.
Suzano's journey to becoming a leader in Brazil's tissue market was swift and built from a strategic blend of organic and inorganic growth. We currently operate six mills with distribution across the entire country. We are building our seventh mill in Aracruz, Espírito Santo. It will have a production capacity of 60,000 tons per year, with production integrated into the pulp mill, facilitating Suzano's expansion in the south and southeast markets. The construction is progressing faster than projected, and the start of operations, initially scheduled for the Q1 of 2026, has been brought forward to the Q4 of 2025. This way, we will consolidate the scope of our national coverage, with the Belém unit serving the north region, the Imperatriz-Mucuri and Maracanaú units serving the northeast and midwest regions, and the Cachoeiro and Mogi units supplying the south and southeast, along with the new Aracruz unit.
Together, these units will produce 340,000 tons of products annually, enhancing our footprint and enabling lower distribution costs and improved service levels compared to our competitors. Suzano, we plant the future.
The combination of this national footprint of mills and the distribution network that we were able to increase allows us now to focus on product diversification. We already have a very good portfolio, but we want to focus and diversify into higher margin items, as you can see here on the bottom of the slide. Also, we have winning brands like Neve, Duramax, and Kleenex that we can grow even further, those brands, with product innovation. For next year, we're going to triple the amount of new launches, 25 compared to 24, and we're going to reduce the time to market in our innovation process. So that's the major plan for 2025 and the years ahead, and now there's another point which is very special, and I know you're eager to discuss, which is financial management and capital allocation.
For that, I would like to invite our CFO, Marcos, to come on the stage.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Marcos Assunção, Suzano's new CFO. And I'd like to focus my presentation on two main topics: capital allocation and our balance sheet strategy. On capital allocation, I would like to reinforce that Suzano has a very solid track record on allocating capital. In the past six years, since 2008, the company invested more than BRL 80 billion in several different projects that generated value to shareholders. I'll give you some examples. To start with, the Cerrado project, we're investing more than BRL 22 billion, and we expect an internal rate of return of 15% on that project. And that considers pulp prices at $600 per ton and FX at 5.25. We also acquired, on the buyback, 110 million shares in the past two years at an average cost of BRL 50 per share. That yields a total shareholder return of above 20%.
Talking about our strategy on allocating capital, whenever the management that you saw here presenting proposes any transaction to the board, we need to see three preconditions set. The first condition, and the most important one, is that the project or the deal needs to add value. So we should have an internal rate of return that is above our WACC, which is around 8.7% in reais terms. That's the most important and critical measure that we've always followed. Second thing, whenever we enter in a negotiation process, we will have a very predefined maximum price that we would pay for an asset. That allows us to reduce what we call a deal mode risk, which is the risk of overpaying for assets. Second thing is that we should maintain our investment grade in any transaction that we enter.
We see the cost of capital as a very important competitive advantage for Suzano, and we would not like to risk that in the future, as we are in an industry that is very high capital intensive, and the last point, all of our projects and deals need to be aligned with our long-term strategy and our growth avenues. In terms of our debt and liquidity strategy, these are the main guidelines that you should monitor and that we should be looking for in the future. First, we would like to have an average maturity of our debt, which is above six years of period or 70 months. We also would like to have limited obligations in the short term, so maturing in the coming 36 months. We would also like to have a very strong cash position to honor all of our maturities in the coming 24 months.
We would also like to have an RCF or a revolving credit facility to be a buffer for us if and in the case there is a stress scenario. And of course, we would not allow to have debt covenants. We would like to have debt. And as you can see, we are in compliance with all of those guidelines. And the result of that, when we look to our chart on the right side of the slide, is that we have a very well-balanced debt amortization schedule with no concentration risk in the short term and with a very competitive cost of 4.9% in dollars for our debt. In addition to maintaining a very healthy cash position and also a very solid balance sheet, we also worked in the past three years to diversify our funding sources.
So we issued $1.85 billion with IFC and Finnvera, which are non-traditional sources of funding that reduces our reliance on banks' balance sheets. Also, we raised more than $1.5 billion in non-traditional markets, such as the Brazilian market with local debentures and also the Chinese market with the Panda Bonds. Our strategy here is to explore new markets and new instruments that will allow us to diversify our funding sources and avoid the risk of the windows of opportunities of the traditional bond markets in the U.S., for example. When looking to our deleveraging case, we see a very clear deleveraging trend for the company. And we expect to reach the bottom of the range of our leverage policy, which is between 2-3 times without any investment cycle. Also important, as Beto mentioned, we're not envisioning any transformation M&A that will change this deleveraging path.
Important to mention as well that in periods of tougher markets, such as in 2019 and 2020, when pulp prices declined meaningfully, the company put in place a contingency plan well organized to improve liquidity and to reduce leverage very quickly. That plan included the sale of non-core assets, sale of inventories, and also freezing growth CapEx. We also believe that the company is in the right path for ratings improvement. When we talk to the rating agencies, they tend to look at two main risks: the business profile risk and the financial risk. We believe that we are on the verge of improving in both metrics. On the business profile, we're improving as we are diversifying more our revenue stream, as we mentioned, through the Pine Bluff acquisition and also through the Lenzing acquisition.
We also improve our business profile by enhancing our cost competitiveness with the projects mentioned here by Aires and also Carlos on the industrial and on the forestry front. On the financial side, we believe that we will reduce our risks by declining our net debt, also declining our gross debt, diversifying our funding sources as we're doing, and eventually extending our debt maturities. If we continue to do that, we believe that we will be in the right track for a ratings upgrade in the future. Now, giving you a guidance for our total operational disbursement for 2027 of BRL 1,900 per ton. The starting point of this guidance is how we are on total operational disbursement in the first nine months of this year, which is a little bit above BRL 2,200 per ton.
To get to our guidance by 2027, we have first to adjust and to factor in the inflation for the year 2025, which will add close to BRL 70 to our cost. Also adjust for our new FX forecast for 2025 of 5.35, which adds another BRL 12 to our cost, but we're seeing some positive dynamics for commodity prices, which will eventually reduce our cost, mainly on the brand side, by 30 BRL per ton, but most importantly, to start with BRL 2,200 , which is our cost today, and get to BRL 1,900 by 2027, we have to rely mainly on initiatives that are being done by the management and that were presented here, mainly on the industrial, the forestry side, and on the CapEx side. On the industrial side, we will have dilution of fixed costs, mainly because of Cerrado volumes.
On the forestry side, we expect a meaningful reduction in our logging distance, which in the first nine months of the year was closer to 190 km, and we expect that to reach 150 km by 2027, and on the CapEx side, we will reduce that by lowering our third-party usage or need on the wood side. Now, on my last slide, just making and bringing the comparison between our current guidance for 2027 of BRL 1,900 per ton and our previous guidance of 1,750, which was issued in the beginning of this year. The main difference here is, first, we are adjusting and including the inflation for 2025. We're also adjusting and including our new forecast for FX for 2025, which is 5.35, before we were at BRL 5. And also, we were a bit more conservative on the logging distance. We now have 150 km for 2027.
And before, in the beginning of the year, we were with 137. With that in mind, I would like now to pass the word to Beto for his closing remarks.
Marcos. I will try to wrap up the presentations from the team. We saw Aires' presentations related to the Cerrado project. What we tried to show here is that cost management in the business that we are, which is the commodity business, is an endless journey. So we saw from Fábio's presentation, we saw from Carlos' presentation, a lot of initiatives that we're going to keep implementing to further reduce cash costs in the future. So this is part of a key element of our strategy. Every day, look to the cost. Again, we are in the commodity business. This is something that we're going to pay a lot of attention to every day.
The second one is the addressable market. Let me go back to Leo's presentation. For me, the message, Leo, was, firstly, we will not be passive in terms of fiber substitution. We will push. We will lead this process. In the end of the day, the customer value proposition that we used to deliver, which was related to service, to pricing, to logistics, now we are adding a more sophisticated process, which also includes technology, which also includes technical support to help our customer to save costs in their production process. As we also just saw from Marcos' presentation, this is a business that, despite the most challenging scenario, we will keep generating cash. How to allocate that cash that we will be generating in the next coming years? Marcos just said the premise that we use to allocate the capital.
And what he also said, which is important to reinforce, is that we want to allocate the capital, preserving the trend of our deleveraging process in our balance sheet. And finally, everything that we just present to you today will be delivered from a management team with a high track record in terms of consistent delivery and a pool of talents that we have in this company that is completely available and ready to deliver what we mentioned here in Brazil and also abroad. So having said that, I would like to invite the whole team to come over so then we can go through the Q&A. Thank you very much.
[Foreign language] Sorry. English. English, okay? Rafael Barcellos from Bradesco BBI.
So thanks for the opportunity and congratulations for the event. Beto, it's great to see you so vocal in saying that a sizable M&A is not part of Suzano's strategy, right? So from now on, I mean, which type of asset you can say that makes sense for Suzano, right? And other than that, I mean, could you please provide your initial thoughts and even assessments on your recent acquisitions, so more color on the Pactiv assets, or your understanding on the Pactiv assets and Lenzing, right? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Thank you, Rafael. Thank you for the question. Firstly, we have decided not to cover, let's say, on a deeper way, the Lenzing project, considering that differently from the Pactiv asset, which we acquired. So we took over. So Fabio is already living there in Arkansas. Fabio is living close to the mill, so he's with the team.
It's very close to exactly what we have. And so Lenzing, we just, as you know, had the two seats in the board. So the vice chairman will be Carlos. Carlos will be the vice chairman, sitting in the board of Lenzing. Leo will take the next board seat in April, later on, early next year. So we decided to understand deeper, study better the, let's say, the company before bringing to discuss with you. But we are very happy with what we have seen so far, not only in Lenzing, but mainly in Pactiv. Fábio and the team, it's doing a very strong diagnosis about commercial, technical, the way that we manage procurement. So we see really opportunities everywhere. And it's good to have the chance to bring to our portfolio the optionality of growing further in this segment in the U.S. market.
That’s the kind of deal that, as I mentioned before, we see a very healthy balance between risk management and growing abroad. Of course, we used to say that if you decide to participate in a specific segment, we need to bring scale. We need to implement our skills, our capabilities to extract value, explore the synergies, and always explore also fiber-to-fiber opportunities. That’s all the kind of things that we will always look at when we decide to analyze an asset. I think there’s a couple of examples that show how we are moving forward in terms of capital allocation. Marcos also mentioned that we will only move forward in this kind of movement if it generates the amount of value that we expect in terms of returns for our business.
We also are investing in a couple of projects here in Brazil, which is also capital allocation. So we saw from Luís's presentation the investment that we are doing in the consumer goods business. By the end of next year, we're going to multiply by four our fluff capacity in the country, which is also a good view of things that we want to grow in the future.
Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much, Suzano team, for the presentation. I'm Leonardo Correa from BTG Pactual. My first question is for Marcos. First, Marcos, congratulations on the new role. It's great to see a former sell-side colleague become a CFO of such a great company.
Thank you very much, Leo.
So congratulations. Y eah. To your point on the buyback, you talked about the internal rate of return on the buybacks above 20%. So just wanted to see how this changes now with the recent rebound in shares and how you're weighing dividends over buybacks at this point in the cycle. We saw the big interest on equity that you guys announced, which was somewhat unexpected. So I just wanted to give you the opportunity to give us a balance on how you're viewing cash returns. The second point, second question for Leo. Leo, it was interesting to see you comment on the softwood spread to hardwood, right? The level is at a peak. You're indicating that you think this is going to normalize a bit, right, given substitution and a price effect, which is natural, historically has been natural.
However, at least to me, given the amount of supply additions in hardwood and the lack of supply additions in softwood, I'm just not sure exactly how this will normalize or if this trend is going to continue to exacerbate to a higher level. So if you can add a bit to that point, I think it would be very helpful. Thank you, Suzano team.
Hi, Leo. Starting with the buyback and dividend question, we will always analyze the returns of the projects that we have in hand, right? So as you saw, the buyback had a very positive total shareholder return, and we did that at a very attractive entry price. All of my colleagues here, they have also a lot of different projects to be analyzed, and we would also see the return of those potential projects in the future.
I would say that there will be a comparison and a competition between projects, and the buyback is included in there, okay? So I think that's the way we think about the buyback. And we have been, as you saw, very opportunistic in terms of pricing of the buyback in the past. In terms of dividends, as you know as well, the company has a very strong track record of growth, reinvesting close to 90% of its free cash flow into the business, into new projects, either projects or M&A. So I think that this continues to be the mindset of the company, of the board. But again, as we mentioned here and reinforced, it needs to add value to the company. So in the future, if we don't find enough projects that are adding or generating value to the company, we could see higher dividends.
But so far, as we have, I would say that we have a strong pipeline of projects that we're still discussing internally.
Leo, thank you for your question on softwood. Maybe I was not clear. Due to the three factors that we are following, which are wood availability, technical age of softwood assets, and the cost of this production, this softwood production, we feel and all our models forecast that this price gap will keep increasing for the future, just like you also said you believe. By no means do we believe it now has stabilized in $200-$220. In our view, softwood will be a successful grade at a much lower production comparison to hardwood grades. It will be used in niche products, and therefore we'll have a price premium, a bigger price premium than it has today. So that's our view.
Hi. Hello. Yep. Morning, everyone. Marcio Farid from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for the presentation. Happy birthday, Leo. What a day to celebrate. I think I want to leverage on the expertise of the whole team, Beto, to your recent path on the logistics side, obviously, Carlos, on the forest side as well. Obviously, a lot of attention and activity going on in Mato Grosso do Sul, right? I mean, Arauco, yourselves, Brazil, just recent news reporting that they are really moving ahead and eventually Eldorado Brasil as well. When we think about the things we need for a new pulp mill, right? Forests, logistics, water. Realistically, how are you guys thinking about the competitive scenario in the Mato Grosso do Sul in the next 5 to 10 years? I think better laid out well that it doesn't matter really the timeline. It appears that it will come.
The question is how realistic those projects are going to be. I think, Carlos, I've mentioned you, and sorry, but I think I mentioned you. I remember you mentioned before that cash is not king. Wood is king, right? Sorry? King and gold. King and gold, right? Obviously, all of that and plus your views that wood is going to continue to be king and more expensive leads to believe that investments in that area are going to continue to be important for Suzano, right? When you look at the CapEx line on forest and land, it has been quite relevant, running above $2 billion. How should we think about that normalized number going forward as well in that context? You mentioned the IRR for some of the projects, which is great.
I'm just missing what is the IRR that you guys target for some of the key projects, including the wood investment as well, which tends to be lower return but more strategic as well. So how should we think about that? Sorry, long question.
Carlos, if I can start here. Marcio, we don't have a very specific target that we disclose in terms of spread over the WACC that we have for internal rate of returns. We gave you a couple of examples here of returns unleveraged that we see even for the Cerrado Project, for the Limeira Project from Fábio, and also from [inaudible] on the tissue side. They're all well above our cost of capital, but we don't disclose the specific spread. But as you saw here, you can rest assured that the first level of defense in terms of project approval is this group here.
All projects are well discussed before we propose anything to the board, and it needs to have a very decent return. We also believe that we shouldn't have a specific spread that is the same for all projects because there are projects that could be with much more complexity that would require a higher spread. There could be projects that we would see more clear synergies, just like the Fibria one, the Fibria merger, that we eventually could see a lower spread because it was a more easy target, I would say, in that sense. But that's what I can tell you regarding the way we think about new projects, mainly on the M&A, and also projects inside the company as well.
Thank you, Marcio, for your question. As I have said, we have planted quite a lot over the last few years. Numbers approaching 300,000 hectares. We have done that to expand our forest basis to serve our Cerrado Projects. We have done that to begin creating optionalities in some regions. I mean, we're going to have more wood in the coming years coming from those plantations. We do believe that the weather can surprise a lot in the coming years.
With that in mind, in some regions, we also planted more. In case we face a more challenged scenario, the wood is going to be there. As I said, wood is king, wood is gold. We are always looking at opportunities. We have a forestry business team walking around, visiting properties, visiting land assets. Whenever we find one that fits in our forestry strategy, and by that, I mean high MAI potential and a nice distance, we try to bring that to our portfolio.
But again, just to reinforce, the main lever in our forest business has been and will be productivity. That's where we have been putting all our efforts. We're investing a lot. We are putting a lot in terms of technology, mechanical technology, digital technology to increase MAI. I believe that we are on the right path to achieve the numbers that are shown here, a growing productivity in the coming years, regardless of the weather scenario. This is what the team has in mind. We're going to increase our MAI. We're going to increase our wood availability, our eucalyptus wood availability, regardless of the scenario. To do that, we need to have better and more resilient clones. We need to go on improving our silviculture, precision agriculture in our business, and we are improving our operational procedures.
So combining that, looking at the assets, the land asset that's fitting on a strategy with a growing productivity, we believe that we're going to be very well positioned for the future. And as you well said, Mato Grosso do Sul has been a very challenging area. Everybody there deals with labor shortage. We have suppliers, we have equipment suppliers, we have labor suppliers, we have service suppliers. And that, gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that do not change. And that's why I said it's all about productivity. And again, we are quite happy. We are quite pleased with our achievements, increasing again our MAI in 15% in the last two or three years.
Marcio, let me try to answer your question conceptually when we talk about, let's say, strategy and capital allocation and, let's say, competitive environment. I think the first thing that we must take into account is that the management team. It's every day thinking about the competitive environment, what's changing, because that's a very important driver when we decide the strategy and when we decide to allocate the capital.
So, understanding very deeply the competitive environment here in Brazil and outside. That's the first thing. Our job is to try to imagine, to think how the market will look like in five, 10 years' time. The second thing is that we saw here during the presentation that, let's say, Cerrado, it's done. It's implemented. It was a great project. We have to look forward to keep looking, again, which is an endless journey, cash cost opportunity. We saw a lot of things related to logistics, as you mentioned. We saw mechanization.
We saw many other projects that we can keep looking for lower cost. Regarding Brazil and regarding Mato Grosso do Sul, I think we also have to take into account that we are. That's not a level playing field situation. We are operating in our court. This is Brazil. We have a sizable business, a huge portfolio, the scale. We have to take advantage of our strengths to face any kind of competition that will come. Because at the end of the day, we should see in the future, when we analyze the hardwood, more production here from any other part of the world. This is, again, our court. We are playing at home. We have terminals, we have logistics, we have scale. We already know how to operate here. We have a port, only such two terminals.
So we have a lot of competitive advantages that we must keep an edge even more against any kind of competition that might come to Mato Grosso do Sul or any other part of Brazil.
So how do you see this?
Hi. Daniel Sasson from Itaú BBA. Thank you so much for the presentation. Marcos, congratulations again on your new role. It's probably the tenth time I congratulate you, but the first in an official event. So let's keep counting. Being there in your new role for a few weeks now, what do you think your most important challenges are? I mean, coming with fresh eyes, do you think there are some low-hanging fruits in terms of specific areas like asset liability management or derivatives or rethinking your financing and dividend policies? What do you think you're going to spend most of your time?
Or maybe it's just a matter of ensuring that you're going to deliver a deleveraging process and then making sure that your stakeholders understand how serious you are about disciplined capital allocation. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And Leo, my second question, thank you for your thoughts on the fiber-to-fiber substitution, very interesting data that you brought here. And building up on the former question regarding softwood and hardwood and this substitution, I guess my question is, maybe if we go back three or five or 10 years, the amount of pulp that you sold to fluff producers has not changed meaningfully, right? I mean, the percentage of the representativeness. This means that your volumes are growing kind of in line with the overall growth in the fluff market, for instance, or fluff/tissue, sorry.
What do you think is different or is going to be different in the next five years so that this substitution can actually happen and you can gain shares and penetrate in customers that it's been so hard for you to do over the past few years, like packaging producers, right? Because hardwood has been cheaper to produce for many years now. That's why hardwood has been gaining share, right? So what has changed structurally in your view that would allow for this increase in penetration over the next years? Thank you.
Hi, Daniel. In terms of challenges, first, I'm not changing much what was being done before, right? I think that's the first and easiest answer to say. I think we have a very strong team not only sitting at this stage here but also on the other levels of the company. So the strategy of the company is also very well established. But I would say the biggest challenge and also the biggest opportunity for the company in the future will be on the capital allocation side. That's where we could add a lot of value to the company as it has been in the past years.
And I think this is not a challenge for myself. It's a shared challenge here amongst this group. And also, I believe that we have a couple of lines of defense for that. So whenever we're discussing an M&A or a project, I think that this executive committee here has very thorough discussions about that. And it's very rich discussions, sometimes tough, but very rich. After that, we also have the financial committee in which we have very experienced people to help us on thinking about the risks and opportunities.
And then we also have the board to be, let's say, the third line of defense. So I would say that the biggest challenge for sure is going to be on capital allocation. The company will be generating a lot of cash. So there will be a lot of cash to be deployed. And making the right investments, considering the right returns at the right timing could make a big difference for the future of the company.
Thank you for your question. I could spend the next or the last 15 minutes of the Q&A talking about what changed, but try to sum up. First thing what changed is our customers' perception and concern. They are concerned, obviously, by seeing that net negative curve which I showed you, if their current softwood supplier will be there for their future. And second concern, obviously, is their cost of production.
Because at those levels of spreads between softwood and hardwood that keeps escalating and now exceeds $200, obviously, they're less and less competitive. So one of the big things is customers are extremely concerned in terms of availability and cost of softwood. Second is we are moving forward in partnership with Fernando, who's here to my right side, and all of Suzano's technology and R&D team with the development of new SKUs, new products to our portfolio, which are getting closer and closer and closer to softwood, such as EucaStrong and EucaPack, as I mentioned. So we're giving the customer the opportunity to have different blends with Suzano's traditional pulp plus percentage of these specific pulps, which gets them closer and closer to what they need to maintain or even increase the final product quality that they have.
Third is that equipment manufacturers have been also looking at this trend. And the new machines, the new paper machines are much more flexible than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago. Originally, they were designed to an industry that had 80%, 90%, 100% share in softwood. As the industry changed, as this landscape changed, as I showed, and now hardwood represents almost 65%, obviously, the equipment manufacturers are also adjusting and updating their machines to be more permissive to a different blend of products. And last but not least, in our case, as I mentioned and Beto reinforced, we will not be on the passenger seat. We will be on the driving seat. We will lead the change with this initiative that we launched one year and three months ago.
We are supporting our customers in multiple ways: education, technology, development, refining, cost reduction, launching and implementing of new products, outpost engineering teams, application engineering teams all across our offices, our innovation hub in China, and several other examples as well.
Just to complete here, so hello, everyone. My name is Fernando. I am Vice President for Sustainability and Innovation. I did not present any slide today, but I'm glad to see that probably you have realized that innovation and sustainability are in the heart of all presentations that we have just shared with you. So we saw this in the Cerrado Project and new projects with paper and packaging, also in new business, new consumer goods as well. So and also in the forest.
One point I think I just I'd like to add some color in this Leo's answer, Daniel, is if you compare Suzano today with the previous companies, at that time, we didn't have the options that we have in terms of different lines of production. So as Aires mentioned, we have 12, 13 mills now, and some of them are fully dedicated to pulp production. And we can use the difference that we have between the mills in order to specialize our products. This is one point that's different that we didn't have this in the past. Second, the options that we have today in terms of using additives to increase, to improve the mill process is totally different what we had in the past.
So now we can use different additives, different chemicals, different alternatives in order to change the hardwood, to change the short fiber in order to go in the direction of the properties of the long fiber. We have opportunities that, to be very frank, we didn't have in the past. And now, and above all of everything, we are, as Leo has just said, we're all in this strategy. This is a big, big priority for us, starting in the forest, going to the pulp mills, and of course, working very close to our clients.
Good morning, everyone. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Caio Ribeiro from UBS. Thank you so much. Two questions here. The first one, going back to the theme on internationalization, right? It was interesting to see that you guys shed a little bit more light on the plans for organic expansion with the assets that you just acquired, and I wanted to hear a little bit more on that strategy, especially in terms of how big can it get? I mean, how far can you guys go with organic expansion in the U.S.?
And how does that compare with potential M&A? I mean, can you guys eventually, let's put it this way, abandon the idea of growing through M&A and going all in on the organic front? What are the advantages of doing that potentially versus doing M&A? And how do you guys see that question for Suzano going forward? And the second one, a little bit more into the short, medium term, but on the commercial strategy, Leo. I mean, we're still seeing you guys with some of your plans, some of your capacity shut down 4% until the end of the year, and still have a guidance for 2025.
But I wanted to know, with Cerrado ramping up even faster than initially expected, I mean, can we expect that you guys are going to have that capacity still offline for 2025? Can we expect that you can even expand that program into other lines if, obviously, if prices continue near current levels? And just wanted to refresh a little bit more on your strategy when it comes to supplying the market. Thank you so much.
Thanks for your question. I'm going to take the first one here regarding internationalization. Just taking advantage of the question, sharing with you a little bit more of info about these first 70 days that we are. I think some of you asked about a little bit more about color, about what we're doing there. The transition has been smooth so far. We were well received by the people there. It's moving according to the plan that we had. We see lots of opportunities. This is very different from the traditional mills that we have here in Brazil.
It's an old mill with a very robust infrastructure that allows us to have all these alternatives that we intend to have. The right answer to your question is that we're trying to raise as many alternatives as possible to reach our objective. Our objective with internationalization is that we want to be sizable and also generate value to Suzano.
With this acquisition of the Pine Bluff and Waynesville assets, the market for paperboard products in the United States is about 10 million tons. We have now 5% of market share with our 420,500,000 tons there. We need to grow. Looking at paperboard, we have zero in containerboard. We can grow it organically. We do have optionalities at the mill to do that. We have space. We have space in pulp production. We can bring pulp from Brazil that will add to the capacity of the pulp and paper production at the mill. They have a machine there which is down, so we can produce. This machine was produced in LWC in the past. We can convert this machine in order to produce other types of packaging grades.
We do have lots of space at the mill with lots of wood available in the state in order to add capacity, as I have shown here today. We do not have a preference. We work closely here with our finance team. We don't have a preference for organic or inorganic growth. So we always discuss in here which is the one that brings us the best return on the investment. For sure, organic, we have more control on the timeline. Inorganic, we don't have the control on the timeline because it doesn't depend on us. So we're working both strategies at the time. We have routes for both. One strategy here, we have more in our hands. The other one, it depends on the other side. But we're looking at both things. We don't have a preference for each one, but we want to be sizable.
That's our objective here. We're going to grow.
Caio, thank you for your question. I will let Marcos answer the second part of it. As you know, and as we have been repeating, this is not a commercial decision. Suzano does not manage its portfolio or its sales based on the average cash cost of Suzano, rather than by an event-by-event analysis done by our financial department based on the marginal cost of that specific ton vis-à-vis the sales that me and my team are generating or could generate for the company. Marcos will tackle that. Our challenge, our commercial challenge is huge for this next three, four months ahead of us. I'm not sure if that's clear to all of you, despite being public information for such a long time. We keep managing Suzano at a very low inventory policy state since 2021.
We learned how to do that. The fact is that the inventories are very, very low, and we have to have a huge discipline to maintain our supply chain insurance to our customers, especially those customers where we have long-term commitments, long-term contracts, and depend most of the time, even exclusively, on Suzano. Next year, on the beginning of the year, the Q1 , we have a huge concentration of planned maintenance downtimes at Suzano's Mills. Coincidentally, all of the major Suzano Mills plus Ribas will stop in the Q1 , and that will take out 300,000 tons of production and, consequently, sale availability for us in the Q1 .
So we have a huge challenge, which is how do we guarantee the pace of our supply chains to all of these customers, and how do we manage those other customers which we sell on a basis which is more, let's say, transactional. And certainly, we're going to curtail our sales in several markets during this period due to this purpose. So we are just in the planning mode for all of this scenario, which is a coincidence, but it's true. And we have to prepare and plan ourselves to keep offering our customers the best we can in terms of supply assurance.
Just to complement, when we analyze the potential shutdown, partial shutdown of a specific capacity, we're always comparing the marginal cost of production to the marginal tonnage that we're selling at the market. As you probably know, even inside every mill, you could have different costs because of wood from third-party or our own wood, or the wood is farther away that we're bringing, so there is a bit of difference in terms of costs even inside one specific mill. But also, as you know, we are the lowest cost producer in the industry.
Whenever we're cutting a little bit of our capacity because it's not economical at some point in time, we need to see also the outlook for prices to take that decision. Whenever we're making that decision, even before that, a lot of other producers should have already made that decision because, as Leo mentioned in his presentation, a lot of production today is underwater at current price levels, so it's a case-by-case analysis that we will do. And sometimes it could make sense, but only for marginal tonnage of our capacity.
There's a virtual question. Yeah, okay.
You go ahead, please.
Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity. So my first question is on your CAPEX guidance. Ultimately, one of the things that caught here is what portion of that CAPEX and what reflects in a very opportunistic way in the long term. And particularly, this is in regard to one, the land and forest expansion in the North Carolina area, where Suzano frequently works with a group of landowners. So looking at that, how do you suggest we develop these in terms of.
Caio, sorry. Your line is breaking. We couldn't hear your question completely. I don't know if you can start again.
Maybe if you don't mind, Caio, it's Marcos. The question is related to CAPEX. Maybe we can go for a broader, let's say, answer. So then we can move forward. So Marcos, can you take it?
Yeah, Caio. Considering if your question was related to CapEx, what we can say here is that, again, we've updated our numbers on sustaining CapEx. And I think that it's much more aligned with what we view for the future of a sustaining CapEx close to BRL 8 billion, BRL 7.8 billion. You saw that in the CapEx that we also have a meaningful amount that we're still investing in expanding our forest base, which is completely aligned with what Carlos mentioned about our reduction in our logging distance in the future and also reducing our dependence from third-party wood.
We believe, and also as Carlos mentioned, that wood is gold, that we should continue to be investing in forestries and land in order to build optionalities for the company. But moving forward, and also in addition to that, there are in our expansion CapEx, there are a couple of projects that are related to improvements in our industrial area. There is this Limeira project that Fabio mentioned in his presentation. There is the Aracruz increasing in tissue capacity that Luis mentioned as well. There is this fluff investment at Limeira Mill that we're tripling or almost quadrupling our capacity of fluff in the future. It will be difficult to see CapEx returning to minimum, minimum sustaining levels because we have a good pipeline of projects that all have decent returns well above our cost of capital in the future.
But for sure, CapEx levels should be much lower than what we saw in the previous three years because we were running the biggest project in the company's history, which was Cerrado Project.
Okay. Rodolfo, we have time for a final question. Rodolfo.
Okay. Can you hear me? Okay. Thank you, Rodolfo Angele from JP Morgan. I have only one, so I'll be fast. I think all investors will agree that they enjoy and they're happy that the message is very clear that no large transformation M&A is in the cards. But we spent the good part of this year discussing this because at one point it was in the cards. So my question to you is, what has changed? What did you learn in this process that led you to come out here and make this commitment?
I think we don't have a change, to be very honest, Rodolfo. The deals that I mentioned as good examples, we are deals that we're in the pipeline already. So I would say that that was very clear, the strategy that we have in place. I would consider that a different movement that we analyzed early this year, that was different for the strategy. That was something that we saw a window, we decide to analyze, and then we go back. Okay? So that's the summary of that. Thank you for asking, and I think we are out of time.
Again, I want to really say thank you for all of you to be here with us, all of you to letting us changing and showing the strategy, the initiatives, to letting the team here present to yourselves everything that we are doing. So again, thank you very much for spending the morning with us today. Bye.