Hello, everyone, welcome to today's press conference. A warm welcome also to those of you who are joining us via webcast. My name is Ulrika Lilja. I'm head of communications, and I'm here today together with our Chair of the Board of Directors, Jorma Eloranta, our incoming President and CEO, Annica Bresky, and our current CEO, Karl-Henrik Sundström. After the introductions made by Jorma Eloranta and Annica Bresky, we will open up for Q&As. For those of you who are joining us via the webcast, please post your questions online. You can post your questions in Swedish, Finnish, or English. With that, I'd like to hand over to you, Jorma.
Thank you. Thank you, Ulrika. Good morning, everyone. As you have seen, the Board of Directors of Stora Enso have decided to appoint Annica Bresky as our new President and CEO of the company starting December 1st this year. The reason for this appointment is that our current CEO, Kalle Sundström, after eight years with the company, has decided to leave Stora Enso as earlier communicated. I will shortly present Annica and why we think that she is an excellent successor to Kalle and very well qualified. First I will some words about Kalle as well as the recruitment process. You all have followed Kalle and know that he has been a key driver in establishing Stora Enso as a renewables materials company. Thanks to his leadership, Stora Enso stands very strong for the future.
Kalle will continue to lead the company until Annica steps in as CEO in December 1st this year. We have considered that this setup of timing ensures a smooth transition to Annica. Let me now say a few words about the process, how we have ended up to this appointment. An important task for the board of directors is to proactively work with the succession planning of the CEO position to ensure the company has the required leadership, to develop and implement the successfully business strategy, and also to define what is required by the position, needed competencies, skills, and experiences to successfully lead the company today and in the future. Also, we have reviewed various potential candidates for the position during the years. Those of you who have read my book about the good board practice can note that we have acted by the book.
As a normal continuation of the company's succession planning process, the board of directors initiated earlier this year an active succession mapping process and gave the task to our remuneration committee to run the process. In this process, we have used an executive search company. They were looking over candidates from a similar kind of industries like pulp and paper, packaging, biomaterials, other process industries, consumer products and industrial goods. Yes, even natural resources. The overall mapping covered several hundreds of executive profiles on top of our great potential internal candidates. As you can recall from our press release in this year, August, Kalle has chosen to resign. When Kalle's resignation letter came, we disclosed the matter without any delay and noted that our successor planning process could now be closed, and we started then to prepare the appointment of our next CEO.
During the process, we interviewed several internal and external candidates, some several times. We have followed a very detailed professional succession planning and appointment process. Based on that, Board was able to make appointment decision unanimously, and I would say relatively quickly. Areas that we have looked into when assessing the candidates' capacity to accelerate growth, production efficiency and operational excellence, as well as a strong leadership and ability to create engagement. Leadership competence, naturally, is a key. This leads me into the most important person of the day, namely Annica. I'm very happy that we have been able to recruit an internal candidate from the current executive management team. I think that demonstrates that we have good leaders within Stora Enso. Personally, as a personal note I need to make, I had a pleasure to meeting with Annica almost 15 years ago.
She was then the key contributor in Stora Enso's Kvarnsveden PM12 project, and PM12 was delivered by Metso. Valmet was part of Metso in that time, and I was the CEO of Metso in that time, and I do remember she was a tough lady even in those days, some years back. But after that, she has been doing other things. She has a very solid business and operational background and excellent understanding of Stora Enso, our organization, and the industry as a whole. In 2017, she became the head of our Consumer Board division, but she has also previously worked for the company for around 10 years. We also find it positive that Annica has gained experience from other companies in our industry. As a part of the executive team since 2017, Annica has been involved in developing the company and the operations during the past years.
Her experience and competence make me and the board very secure in saying that Annica is the very best person for the position and to lead Stora Enso going forward. With this, I would like to hand over to incoming President and CEO, Annica.
Thank you. Well, thank you very much for your warm words, Jorma. Good morning, everyone. I specifically want to say that I'm very honored and proud for the vote of confidence from the board. Of course, I'm very happy to have the opportunity to be the new CEO of Stora Enso. A few words about my background. I'm Swedish in nationality, I have a Greek origin. I'm married. We have a teenage son. As Jorma pointed out, I work 20 years now in this industry, having encountered most of the businesses that we have within Stora Enso. The last two years, I've been heading Consumer Board, before that, I was the CEO of Fagerlund Paper Board, Managing Director in BillerudKorsnäs, as Jorma very well pointed out, I've been also working in operations, ramping up in paper division, back then, Stora Enso's biggest investment.
I'm an engineer, like many of my colleagues in Stora Enso, and I have an executive MBA degree. Moving on now to Stora Enso, I'm extremely happy to have the opportunity to lead our company into the future. As Jorma stated, we have a very strong position, good people across the globe, very strong and competent teams. Sustainability is at the core of our business and a key competitive advantage for us. I'm specifically very proud to be providing the market with solutions based on renewable materials and that we take the lead in combating climate change. My main priorities and my ambition now moving forward is, of course, to drive our transformation and innovation agenda, and to make sure that we grow our businesses and deliver value together with our customers and employees and partners all over the world.
I'm very privileged to have a very well experienced, high-performing, and devoted team around me, which is a great advantage for us as a company. I'm also happy that me and Kalle have agreed on a very smooth transition, which, of course, ensures good continuity for our business moving forward. Thank you very much.
We open up for Q&A. We start with the room here in Helsinki. Once more, for those of you who are joining via webcast, please post your questions online and we will take them in the room here. Do we have any questions from the audience? "Hufvudstadsbladet".
Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer Snårbacka from Hufvudstadsbladet. [Non-english content]
In English, I guess, for all of us to understand. We have a great company in Stora Enso. As I said, our renewable materials are the key competitive advantage that we have. We have been driving a very strong innovation agenda, and we will continue to do that and create value for our customers in joint innovation projects. I'm very confident in the many good people and teams that we have that we will manage to grow the company, also in the future.
Any other questions here from the room?
Everything is good.
It was crystal clear, perhaps.
Yes, I think so. Here we have Bloomberg. Yes.
Leo Laikola from Bloomberg News. I just wanted to ask a little bit about the outlook you see for the company. You're taking over the company at the time when it faces sort of various challenges from slowing European growth and softer demand and declining prices in China, for pulp in particular, and also for containerboard and lumber. What do you think are the key measures you will need to take to tackle the rather challenging market outlook?
Well, as I said, we have a strong company as the foundation. Our teams are already working with a lot of activities. I'm very happy that we initiated our Profit Protection Program very early on. We will benefit from that. Of course, the different businesses have different cyclicalities. I believe we stand very strong to tackle the challenges for the future. My focus will, of course, to maintain our promises in the Profit Protection Program, to make sure that we succeed with our ramp-up of Oulu conversion, which is coming up next year. Those are two of the key priorities I have.
Additional questions? Since we don't have any incoming questions from the webcast, we thank you for your attention today and conclude today's press conference. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you