Hello everyone, and warm welcome to Stora Enso's Capital Markets Day 2025 here in London, and to all of you joining us via the webcast as well. My name is Jutta Mikkola, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Stora Enso. With me today on stage will be our President and CEO, Hans Sohlström, our CFO, Niclas Rosenlew, and our business area leaders, Andreas Birmoser, Carolyn Wagner, and Johanna Hagelberg. I'm very excited about today and our agenda. Like the high-rise building we are here today, Stora Enso is also reaching high and looking forward. First, let's discuss the outcome of the strategic review and outline next steps. Our focus will be on evolving Stora Enso and our strategic priorities for the coming years.
We are also changing our reporting structure, which we will explain, as well as our new group financial targets and the way to get there. We will, in the second session, be rolling up our sleeves and taking a deep dive into the business. You will get insights into what drives our operations and sets us apart in the industry. Please be active and ask questions, especially during the Q&A sessions, as well as during the breaks and lunch following the event. Our group leadership team is here as well, and they are waiting to have discussion with you. To those who are attending via webcast, you may submit your questions by clicking the Ask Question button located in the upper right-hand side next to the stream. As said, I'm super excited for today. We have a lot to share, so let's dive in.
Nothing new here. Or there. Or here. Or anywhere. Fossil-based packaging is outdated. We're here to do better. Unwavering convictions. Newfound ambitions. Optimized operations. Sharpened focus. Renewed approach. Making efficiency the new baseline for sustainability. Customer centricity is the new standard for performance. To offer better choices here. There. Everywhere. Renewable materials are the way of the future for packaging made from fresh and recycled fibers that will be used time and time again. From old to new to renewable. We are Stora Enso, the Renewable Materials Company.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Really great to see you all here, and welcome also everyone joining through the webcast. This is an important day for Stora Enso and hopefully also for all of you. I'm Hans Sohlström, I'm the President and CEO of Stora Enso. Today we are going to talk about the roadmap for the future, how we are building on strong foundations, how we are strengthening our business focus, sharpening our focus, and how we are taking determined actions to build a better-performing Stora Enso and maximize shareholder value. Before starting, we know that business success is all about people and it's about leadership. I'm so proud to have with me here our group leadership team, and I would like to introduce them one by one so that you can reach out to them during the breaks or during the Q&A sessions and ask questions.
It's a great team, hardworking, ambitious, and we are working hard, but we also have great fun together. Let's start here by introduction. First of all, our CFO, Niclas Rosenlew. Then we have our Executive Vice President in charge of People, Legal, and General Counsel, Micaela Thorström. We have our EVP Strategy and Sustainability, Tobias Bäärnman. Now moving to the lower row here with the Executive Vice Presidents, with the P&L responsibility being in charge and accountable of their business areas. We have first Cardboard, Andreas Birmoser. Then we have Food Service and Liquid Board, Markku Luoto. Container Board, Lars Völkel. Packaging Solutions, Carolyn Wagner. We have Biomaterials, Johanna Hagelberg. Wood and Energy, Pauli Torikka. Last but not least, we also have appointed the President and CEO for the new forest company. He's also here with us today, Tuomas Hallenberg.
Good. Let's move on. We have two objectives of today. We are going to share more information about the demerger of our Swedish forest assets, as well as then also to affirm Stora Enso's strategic focus and way forward, the roadmap to achieving the updated financial targets that we have published yesterday. Where are we today? Stora Enso is a leading, a global leader in renewable materials. Our purpose is to replace fossil products, non-renewable materials with renewable products. Everything we do is based on wood raw material, renewable raw materials, and replacing the fossil alternatives, plastics, cement, and other. Our ultimate target is to maximize shareholder value. The most important KPI for me, for our group leadership team, is total shareholder return. The way we are maximizing shareholder return is really through high customer value based on innovation, quality, sustainability, and with efficient, integrated, cost-competitive operations.
Our corporate culture, we call it our positive performance culture, is based on four A's. I bet if you ask any one of our 19,000 employees today what are the four A's, they can all speak about the four A's of ambition, of agility, analytical approach, as well as accountability, and what it means for them and their work with their teams. This is a snapshot of Stora Enso today. I'm truly proud of the fact that Stora Enso is a part of solving some of the biggest challenges on the planet, climate change. Last year, our products helped avoid 14 million tons of CO2 emissions through our renewable products, replacing plastics and cement and other fossil materials.
Today, packaging is representing about 60% of our total sales, and we have leading market positions in all our businesses, and we will deep dive into this throughout this day and these presentations. How have we arrived here? In the beginning of this millennium, actually 80% of Stora Enso's roughly EUR 10 billion sales, 80% was printing papers. So newsprint, magazine papers, copy papers, and we all know about the declining printing paper business. During the 10 years back, 2015, still printing papers was the biggest business within Stora Enso, representing almost 40% of our turnover. It was bigger than packaging at that time. Since then, we have systematically invested in growing our packaging business.
Most recently, we have also made some major investments here through the acquisition of Young Packaging, as well as our investment into Europe's most modern and efficient consumer board line in Finland that we are currently ramping up. Thanks to this systematic work on growing in packaging, where there are good growth prospects also for the future, in fact, our packaging business growth throughout the last 10 years has been above 5% per year. Now we are taking the next step to sharpen our focus even further. We have divested at the end of September 175,000 hectares of Swedish forest with two objectives: to strengthen our balance sheet, but also to confirm the value of forest land. We sold exactly at our book value, meaning an enterprise value of EUR 900 million.
We are now taking the next steps with the demerger of our remaining forests in Sweden, 1.2 million hectares valued at close to EUR 6 billion, demerger into a separate stock-listed company with our current owners as the owners of this company. We have also announced that we are starting a strategic review of our Central European wood products businesses, which are non-synergistic with our core renewable packaging business. I'm going to quickly talk through about the demerger. What, why, and when? We are creating two champions in their field. Stora Enso, the renewable packaging renewable materials company with a strong and increasing focus on renewable packaging, where we are maximizing profitability through leading with customers through our products and innovation and sustainability, as well as operations that are efficient and cost-competitive.
The main targets for Stora Enso, the renewable materials company, is, as published yesterday, to continue to grow, as we have done during the last decade, at least 4% per annum, and to generate an adjusted EBIT margin of above 10%. We have the roadmap how to get there. We are convinced that we can deliver on these targets. The business is global. We are serving blue chip customers all around the world, some of the most valuable brands who are operating in 60 countries globally. The forest company is about value appreciation and growing the value of the company through constantly developing the assets in a sustainable way and also to develop additional new revenue streams. Looking at historical facts, and I'll deep dive into this later on, the value appreciation during the last three decades has been 7% for Swedish forest assets.
The current value of these assets is close to EUR 6 billion. Why are we doing this? These two businesses have distinctive business dynamics, characteristics, and they also require distinctive business strategies for maximum value creation. This is also the way we can unlock not only the full business value by having a full focus on the very distinctive different businesses, but also to unlock the value for our shareholders. When will this happen? The demerger will take place during the beginning of 2027. We will keep you updated, of course, throughout the whole process with our proceeding in this process. During this time, we have the possibility and opportunity to carry on and carry out all the necessary preparations, but also to demonstrate the strength and attractiveness of both businesses.
We are organizing a capital market day in a year or so during next year's time, focusing fully on the forest company, the financial targets, the strategy, the business plan for the forest company. Let's deep dive into the forest company. What makes this an attractive asset for investors and owners? Looking at Sweden and forests in Sweden in general, these are not only about our forests, but all forests in Sweden. Swedish forest assets have yielded a 7% value appreciation since 1990, over three decades. Forests are not only a sustainable asset as such, it's really a value engine. If we break down now the 7% into pieces, we can see that during the last three decades, land appreciation represents 4.5% per year value appreciation. In a way, it's natural because there is no more land produced.
Land is a scarce resource. There is also more growth in Swedish forests than harvesting. This means that the standing stock, the biological growth of forests in Sweden, has exceeded harvesting and added 1% per year additional value through the growing standing stock. In fact, this 1% is accelerating thanks to new sustainable forestry practices. We have, of course, the wood harvesting, which has historically, since 1990, given a 1.5% return. About 3% of the standing stock has been harvested. The margin for this business has been well above 50% historically during the last three decades. There are increasingly new non-harvesting related revenue streams that become more and more important all the time. Renewable energy like wind energy, solar parks, as well as also recreational income from recreational use or other gravel and other land development and optimization.
What makes our forests in Sweden especially attractive within this landscape? There is a simple answer, and that is location. Our forests are located optimally in the mid-south part of Sweden, where the productivity and the growth is significantly higher than in other areas in Sweden, more north. Stronger and better productivity than, for instance, our main other forest-owning peers. On top of this, in this region, in that mid-south part of Sweden where our forests, 1.2 million hectares, are located, there is also an especially strong concentration of wood-consuming forest industry. In fact, the forest industry in this proximity, in this region, is consuming 40 million cu m of wood annually. Our standing stock on this 1.2 million hectares is 130 million cu m, and we are harvesting over 3 million cu m per year, meaning that harvesting is still clearly below the growth.
The standing stock is increasing 1% per annum, but this is something that also can be accelerated. On top of all of this, there are also very strong sustainability features of our forests. Our forests are sequestering, binding 1.5 million tons of CO2 every year. This gives us also opportunities for new revenue streams as we move forward. In addition to this, there will be an 18-year wood supply agreement in place between the forest company and Stora Enso. It will be with reducing commitments, gradually reducing commitments throughout that 18-year period. This enables to provide to the forest company stability and predictability for the first years, for the first period, but then also flexibility to gradually build up new customer relationships and new businesses.
The pricing will be market price-based, and it's really important for us that this will be an independent company operating on market practices so that we can really build an independent leading forest company. It is not all about harvesting. It is also about those new incremental revenue streams. I'll give you some examples here. I'm truly proud of the fact that within Stora Enso Forests, we have developed a world-leading digital tool. Nobody else has this. We call it precision forestry. It is a digital model that is using artificial intelligence to all the time get more and more accurate, combining our data on our own forests with satellite data and laser scanning data on other forests.
We have been able to create a very accurate digital model of all forests, not only our forests, but all forests that exist in the Nordic countries and in the Baltics. What's the benefit of this? We have already, with this model that gives really granular and exact data, managed to find in our own forests tens of thousands of hectares more productive land. In addition, we can also protect the environment more effectively by identifying on a very granular level valuable natural habitats. It's all about forestry, but being much more data-driven, much more precise. Using this tool, we can improve our productivity, our income, but at the same time also protect valuable natural habitats much more exact.
We can even predict with a high level of accuracy where, for instance, certain species and endangered species are living, or we can also see that we are proactively taking this into account when we, for instance, are developing our forestry plans. We have renewable energy as another big opportunity for us. Our strategy when it comes to renewable energy is to develop ready-to-build projects because we have the land and we identify the optimal land for wind parks, solar parks. We apply for the permits, which can be very long processes taking several years. We also organize the land connections, build the roads, grid connections. We have ready-to-build projects. We sell these projects with the permits, with the infrastructure to, for instance, energy companies who are specialized in operating wind parks or solar parks.
We have plans in place now to commercialize 10 TWh of wind park projects. This 10 TWh is only a fraction of the total potential we have on these 1.2 million hectares of land. There is many times bigger potential, but it takes time to develop this. Many of these revenue streams come then fairly long into the future. We have the land value optimization. We constantly already today, we sell land with high air set-aside areas, and we buy land which are more fiber-rich and more productive. Also through land planning and zoning for real estate, housing, industrial use, we can significantly increase the value of our land areas. Last but not least, carbon storage. This is clearly a new emerging market since about one year back.
With all the carbon sequestration in our land area, with all the carbon credits that we have, and new ways of actually capturing carbon without affecting forest productivity. For instance, by rewetting dried peatlands, which do not produce any wood in any case, by rewetting peatland, scientists have concluded that we can tie up 250 tons per hectare of carbon on these rewetted peatlands. There are today more and more multinational technology companies, leading companies that you have all heard about, who are in contact with us, asking us to sequester, to bind carbon for them. They are prepared to pay to us so that we capture carbon on their behalf. This is an interesting emerging business and new future revenue stream that we are going to build on.
A new market with new opportunities, with all the data centers all around the world and all the energy consumed for data centers. The technology companies are eagerly looking for carbon sequestration, and they are prepared to pay to someone like us who can provide that service and also the evidence of their carbon being captured. Let's now move into Stora Enso, the renewable materials company with a strong focus on packaging. First of all, let's start by acknowledging facts. I mean, our profit, our cash flow is far too low. We know that, and we are working on it every day to improve profitability and cash flow. Since 2023, we have encountered an unusually challenging operating environment with record high wood costs, especially in the Nordics, with geopolitical uncertainty, which has fueled uncertainty among consumers. What is really driving our demand is consumer spending.
With lower consumer spending, also demand is lower. At the same time, we have gone through an unusually heavy investment phase. Since 2023, we are taking determined actions to improve our cash flow, to strengthen our margins, expand our margins, and improve our profitability. I will give several examples about this later on during this morning. We will continue to focus on our four strategic priorities, which is to lead in customer value through customer-driven innovation, sustainability, and quality. To continue growing faster than the market through our cost-efficient assets, through our offering and our collaboration, winning with customers. We will continue focusing on expanding our margins through our business and customer focus, as well as through our positive performance culture and our systematic way of working on value creation initiatives, which we will hear more about later on.
We will focus on generating cash with high conversion ratio, as well as disciplined capital allocation. Also more about this as we move forward. These are our four strategic priorities. They have been for two years, and they are going to be also for the years to come. These four strategic priorities are built on five strengths or positionings that I want to explain and open up more to you in the next. First of all, all the markets we are operating in are growing, driven by strong sustainability drivers. We have exited the declining printing paper business, and everything we have now in our portfolio, there is long-term growth driven by consumer preferences and sustainability drivers. We also have leading market positions in all the businesses we operate in, and we have a broad, very strong differentiated product portfolio, which is based on customer-driven innovation.
Our assets are well invested. We have strong assets and a cost-competitive asset base. Last but not least, we have now, during two years, the proof that we can, through a continuous improvement culture and through this performance culture, continuously find ways of reducing our costs and improving our competitiveness. I'll walk through these five areas one by one with you here now. First of all, the global packaging industry is transitioning, driven by new and emerging customer preferences. Today, globally, over half of all consumers care about the package. They care about the recyclability of packages. They care about the carbon footprint of packages. They care about the renewability of packages. Just to give an example, today, 1/3 of all food in the world is being wasted. 1/3.
This means 1.3 billion tons of food goes to waste every year in a world of scarcity where people do not get enough food. We are especially good in food and beverage packaging. We have solutions to provide safe food packaging solutions and to preserve food also in right-sized packages from production to the end consumer. We are, in fact, contributing to reducing food waste through our solutions. We are extremely well positioned, actually, to gain from these changes in the global packaging market. In fact, all research shows that renewable packaging materials will continue to gain market share from plastics. If we look at our main two markets where we operate in packaging materials, consumer board as well as virgin fiber-based container board, this market, this global market, is predicted to grow by 12 million tons of annual consumption, annual demand in the next five years.
Within these segments, especially the food and beverage packaging, which is really our core, is having the fastest growth rates, well above 3%. We have also leading market positions in liquid packaging board. We are clearly the world's largest producer in cross-laminated timber also, as well as in unbleached specialty pulps. We are a European market leader in other virgin fiber-based carton boards and boards, as well as in fluff pulp and sawn wood. In container board, we have regional leading positions. We are serving some of the leading brands in the world. They are our customers, and you will get many examples here as we listen to Andreas', Carolyn's, and Johanna's presentation. Why do they choose us as their partner? Because we help them to become more attractive on the shelves in the retail stores.
They want to have sustainable, recyclable, renewable packaging solutions, which look attractive, which appeal to consumers and make consumers choose their product over other products. We can help these customers to differentiate. We can help them also through lightweighting to save costs compared to competing board grades, for instance, or packaging solutions. We can also help them to significantly reduce the carbon footprint, which is so important for these brand owners. They have carbon commitments also and climate commitments. We have cases where we have helped our customers reduce their carbon footprint by 70% by moving to our choices instead of alternative packaging materials. Customer-centric innovation is really at the heart and in the core of what we are doing. We come up and we launch a new product to the market every month.
If we look at this customer-centric innovation, I'm so happy by the fact that today, 16% of all our packaging material, all our board sales actually comes from new products that have been launched into the market during the last five years. This is accelerating. We are investing more than ever before in customer-centric innovation when it comes to our packaging business. I have here two examples for you just as examples, and you will hear many more examples later on. AvantForte is by far the best performing brown and white top kraft liner with the best strength-weight ratio in the whole world. This is especially appealing to packaging needs, transport packaging needs, where you have especially demanding conditions, like for instance, fruit and vegetable producers who are operating in humid conditions and who have global supply chains, so logistics spanning over the whole world.
We have so many cases where AvantForte is by our customers actually the only choice and also the most cost-efficient choice thanks to the strength-weight ratio. We have new Tambrite as another example, which has the best stiffness-to-weight ratio among all carton board grades globally, which means that it's a preferred choice. It's something we have developed together with our pharmaceutical customers, and it's their preferred choice. Looking at our product offering and our product range, we also have the most complete, the broadest product offering in the industry. This is a strength when building partnership with our customers, the brand owners, and the converters, because we are their one-stop shop. Whatever their renewable packaging needs are, we have it, and we can offer it to them. This deepens our relationships and strengthens our partnership with customers.
There are also other advantages around customer-centric innovation because we have the experience of producing all these grades. There is also cross-fertilization of ideas and innovation, which makes us even stronger in coming up with new product offerings. Last but not least, this also gives us strength when it comes to our asset utilization. Depending on trends, depending on market and customer needs, we can also optimize the asset utilization over the whole platform. What about our assets? We have the biggest production lines and also among the youngest production lines, meaning the lowest technical age. We have well-invested modern technology, and we have big production facilities, which gives economics of scale.
In fact, when you look at our board production mills and units, 75% of our machines' production lines are within the first and second quartile in cost efficiency, so on the cost capacity curves. We are integrated. That is a big advantage also in the forest industry and in the board production. What you need in order to be cost-efficient is that you need those big modern board machines. On-site, you need to have that integrated pulp production. We have, in fact, out of our 6 million ton of board production capacity, paper board production capacity, 5 million ton of on-site integrated pulp capacity. Most of our board mills, almost all of them, and most of our capacity is fully integrated backward into pulp production on-site. On top of that, we have sawmilling capacity on-site or close by.
This is extremely important thinking about wood procurement as well as cost-efficient raw material supply. Because in fact, about half of the logs going into sawing ends up in chips and sawdust, which is cost-efficient raw material for pulping and board making. You cannot really be cost-efficient without having these three components, preferably everything on the same site. In container board, we are, of course, in virgin fiber container board, backward integrated, like in cotton board, into on-site pulp making and sawmilling. We are also backward integrated in terms of our recycled fiber-based test liner production into recovered fiber or paper, recovered paper collection, as well as recycling facilities. We are also forward integrated into corrugated box making because this is a very local business. It is important to be competitive here that you have test liner production and corrugated box production close by.
Carolyn will open up this later on in her presentation. On top of this, we have 2.5 million ton of market pulp capacity. More than half of this 2.5 million ton is among the world's lowest cost, most cost-efficient eucalyptus capacities in South America. It is a clear trend in packaging materials that eucalyptus pulp is more and more gaining share. We are doing that actively. We are using more and more eucalyptus pulp in our recipes, in our mills, because it is a cost-efficient solution. For instance, Veracel, if we look at our capacity in Veracel with Oulu fully ramped up, Oulu will consume 250,000 tons of Veracel eucalyptus pulp as a part of their furnish together with CTMP and some other chemical pulp.
That means that we will consume 75% of Veracel's capacity internally in Oulu, in Beihai, China, in Force, in Sweden, and so forth. Enocell and Skoghall, they are very much specialized pulp mills, and Johanna will open up that in her presentation. They need to be specialized also because they are operating in the Nordics where the raw material wood cost is higher. Through specialization, we can make healthy margins also in these businesses. Enocell and Skoghall are partly, to some extent, supplying our board needs for, for instance, unbleached kraft pulp as well as some other pulps. This vertical integration is a clear advantage. We are, in fact, the only board producer, paperboard producer in Europe with own cost-competitive eucalyptus pulp assets in South America. That is a strength we want to build on.
Now we are coming actually to my favorite theme, and that is about our own actions to continuously improve our margins and our profitability. We are working very systematically since two years back in operational efficiency improvements, commercial excellence, sourcing improvements, as well as fixed cost reductions. I am so happy to see the results we have been able to achieve during the last two years, and we are continuing on this path. We have a process in place that we call VCP, Value Creation Programs. What it really means is that we have a systematic approach to, for instance, in operations, we have mill sprints, which means that we are focusing two weeks, one mill at a time. We gather all the best experts we have in different fields of operations: energy, board making, pulp making, optimization, wood yard, all of that.
We gather those best experts together. We focus on one mill at a time. We generate ideas and plans how to reduce our costs, improve operational efficiency. Of course, we move to the next mill, and we do the mill sprint two or three weeks at the next mill. We have now already gone through all our mills with the first round of mill sprints, generating lots of ideas, initiatives, and also executed on these ideas. We are actually, we have already started the second round. It is a part of our continuous improvement work. I'll give you some example to show what kind of VCP initiatives we have identified and executed on.
On the commercial excellence side and sourcing side, we have a win-room concept where we gather experts together to focus on a specific question, for instance, a certain chemical that we need to source. We go through and we work together with our suppliers to find ways of reducing our total cost of ownership. Of course, we work on cost efficiency measures through fixed cost reductions. During the last two years, we have reduced our workforce by over 2,000 FTEs. We are continuing on this path. As a result of the reorganization we announced and implemented on July 1st, we can take the next steps of streamlining our organization by delayering, taking off layers in the organization, and even further reduce our fixed costs.
We have also a project management organization in place on the group level, as well as in all our business areas that is supporting the Value Creation Program work. We have integrated our VCP work into our daily steering of the business: business planning, forecasting, follow-ups, and daily management of our company. In fact, when we look at what we have achieved during the last two years, we have, in fact, and we can prove that EUR 850 million of profit impact through the VCP work has hit our bottom line already. We have in the pipeline of ideas to be executed and to be developed EUR 500 million-EUR 700 million more. This is not a project. It will not stop here. This is our new culture, our continuous improvement work, where we constantly look for new improvement opportunities.
It was not enough that we did a first round of mill sprints. We started the second round, and there will be a third round and a fourth round. It is our new way of working. This is really what we mean with our performance culture. I will give you now some examples of these Value Creation Program initiatives and their results. We have so far identified over 4,000 VCP initiatives. I am truly proud of the work done by everyone in Stora Enso in every mill, every function, every part of our organization. We have 800 initiative leaders who are working on these together with their teams, meaning that we have thousands of people who are every day working on saving costs, improving our margins. Here are three examples of these 4,000 initiatives.
We have, for instance, in the Imatra mill, Advanced Energy Optimization Management, which has yielded us, given us more than EUR 6 million of annual cost savings. We have in Enocell found ways of increasing the production of tall oil, and there is a market for tall oil, which means that we have about EUR 2 million annual profit impact through this VCP initiative. Force is a great example of moving to 100% Veracel eucalyptus pulp. We have been able to replace other pulp grades, Nordic pulp grades, and to save over EUR 7 million every year, improving the cost competitiveness of this mill. Here there are three other examples out of these 4,000. In Montes del Plata, we have moved to methanol from our evaporation plant to be used to replace heavy fuel oil, giving us a saving of over EUR 1 million annually. Beihai is another great example.
Beihai has been working systematically on improving their efficiency, performance. In fact, today, Beihai has the best overall equipment efficiency of all board mills, not only our board mills, but all board mills in the world. They are actually the world record in OEE, the best performing board mill among all, according to statistics that we receive from board machine suppliers. We have Skoghall, another example, improving the digester process and optimization, giving more than EUR 2 million annual savings. These six examples are relatively big saving examples. Most of the VCP initiatives, we are speaking about hundreds of thousands of euros or EUR 500,000, that magnitude. These are really good and clear examples.
We share these practices regularly with our whole company through what we call transformation days, where we have had so far, they are virtual meetings, Teams meetings, and so far we have had thousands of our employees participating. We organize these transformation days for two reasons. First of all, we want to share best practices, and we want to inspire each other to come up with good ideas. For instance, the great idea of energy saving in Imatra, I bet that in Skoghall they all think that actually we can do even better. We need to show them that we can save even more. That is the kind of spirit we want to create here, inspiring each other. There is also another reason, and that is to celebrate success and to really put the true heroes in our organization into the spotlight.
The engineers, the experts that are working every day on improving the performance and portfolio and performance of our company, the 800 initiative leaders and the team members. Those are the true heroes that really get this improvement and builds a better and stronger Stora Enso. Now, summarizing, we are building on our five strengths of growing markets, attractive markets with leading market positions. We have attractive product offering based on our customer-centric innovation. We have cost-competitive, well-invested assets, and we have the systematic continuous improvement work, the performance culture, and the Value Creation Program work that is accelerating in our organization.
We are determined to continue focusing on our four strategic priorities to lead in customer value, to grow faster than the market, continuing on the path we have demonstrated throughout the last decade, and also building on the big investments that we have carried out during the recent years. We are determined to expand our margins and our profitability through business focus, through the VCP work, and our systematic, diligent, and disciplined approach. We are generating cash with high conversion ratio as well as a very strong and disciplined capital allocation for the years to come. Now I will hand over to our CFO, Niclas. He will explain how these strategic priorities are translating into our financial plans and financial performance. Over to you, Niclas.
Hello everyone and fantastic to see you all. It's great to see a room full of nice and good people and look forward to the questions as well. Just on a personal note, I joined this fantastic team and this fantastic company in January. Before I joined, I was joined by a few people who knew Stora Enso that, okay, what sort of animal is Stora Enso? Very much echoing what Hans was saying, I mean, we are highly appreciated by our customers. We are known for innovation. We are known for sustainability. There were a couple of weaknesses, a couple of improvement areas as well. Those were portfolio. Portfolio a bit complex and then capital allocation. Super happy actually that we are addressing these weaknesses as well as the strengths head on. I'll talk a bit about capital allocation and portfolio Hans explained about.
We are addressing the forest and we also have the strategic review related to the Central European wood products. What Hans said, how will that translate into performance and financials? I'll start with two things we announced yesterday, communicated yesterday, financial targets and then segment reporting, how you will read us, how you will understand how we progress going forward. I'll get into profit, CapEx, debt, and cash flow. Financial targets, first of all, we have the macro drivers. We have what it takes to grow. We are invested. We have competitive assets. The macro drivers, we are in a market which is growing and likely growing for a long time to come. We intend to grow more than the market. The way we define it is that that's more than 4%.
Secondly, EBIT, very important, especially now here now in this environment, but also going forward. We have a clear ambition to get to 10% and actually above 10%. I'll come back to this. As Hans mentioned, the good thing with this is that this is in our own hands. We do not rely on the market to get to 10% and above 10%. I'll come back to that. Shareholders, super important. We need to put even more weight on shareholder return. One sign of this is the dividend, of course. 50% of net profit over a cycle needs to be dividend or paid out as dividend. The fourth one is our net debt and balance sheet strength. Here we actually take pride in being conservative. We will drive our net debt down to less than one times EBITDA.
Also here, very clear plan in our own hands, not relying on external factors. These are for external, or not just external, but these are for long-term targets, both internal and external, which we relentlessly will work on and will get to. How do you follow us? How do we follow ourselves? What progress we are making, where we are doing well, where we need to do more. We are also renewing our segments. From Q1 onwards, we have consumer packaging, we have integrated packaging, and we have biomaterials. Let me briefly touch upon the segment reporting before moving on to profit and capital allocation. To the left here, you'll see the current or the old segment reporting as of first Q1 2026. That's out of the window, and we move to the new one, which you see here to the right.
Again, consumer packaging, integrated packaging, biomaterials, and then other. What makes me excited here, and one thing kind of in addition to what Hans mentioned about VCPs, which we relentlessly push every day, is the P&L responsibility. Behind these segments, we have six business areas, and every business area is P&L responsible. You have the owners of the six business areas here in the room, and we'll hear more from them in a few minutes here. As part of the six business areas, we have 24 business units, each of the 24 being P&L responsible. This is something that we set up now July 1st. This is up and running. Now we are working through the motions really to get people used to this P&L responsibility. It's actually a distributed P&L responsibility.
It's not just Hans who needs to scream and shout and say, "Improve, improve, improve," but actually we all take responsibility for delivering results day in, day out. One detail here is that within the other segment, we have the new business area, wood and energy, big operation for us given what we do as a company. Here we will also have the Swedish forest. So the to be de-merged Swedish forest is part of other, as well as the wood products, Central Europe, which will also be part of other. Moving on to profit and how will that look like going forward, how will we get to the 10% and above? Let's first start with the history. We've had a couple of pretty volatile and tough years here behind us.
When we look behind the kind of headline numbers, what's been happening the last couple of years, if we go to 2024 first, in 2024, we had a significant headwind from higher fiber cost. Fiber cost were actually EUR 300 million higher in 2024 compared to the prior year. Despite that, we actually improved the profitability. That was thanks to the value creation actions. That was thanks to the relentless work every day throughout the organization to improve the performance. We actually had EUR 450 million of identified actions in 2024, offsetting the market headwinds. If we move to this year, 2025, it's actually a similar picture. Yes, we've had market headwinds, consumer demand, weak fiber costs, another EUR 300 million higher than the prior year, offset by EUR 400 million in own actions.
On top of that, we've had the headwind from the Oulu ramp-up, as you know, a bit more than EUR 100 million in headwind, but all in all, underlying profitability improving despite the market headwinds and again, thanks to the own actions. Where does that lead us? Today, we actually give or take a 7% EBIT company. Assuming then, not just assuming, as we are planning to de-merge the Swedish forest, take the Swedish forest out, that will take our EBIT margin down a notch. From that notch down, we are climbing up to 10% and above. Where does that come from? Again, very important point, this is through our own actions. We are not relying on the market. We have identified between EUR 500 million and EUR 700 million of own actions coming on stream and having an EBIT impact, profit impact over the next few years.
Again, we heard about this from Hans. What are these? These are operational, these are sourcing, these are cost-down activities, the whole range. They are all logged. We all have them in a system. We have a small central team managing this. Of course, the activities, the actions, they come from the P&L responsible units. It is a pretty methodical, at least for me, a pretty cool way of doing it. On top of the EUR 500 million-EUR 700 million in own actions, we have a large investment, primarily Oulu here, but also the Lier ramping up, coming on stream, which will add another positive measure as these are margin accretive volumes or sales coming on stream. With that, 10% or more. On top of that, one day the market will come back. That will be on top of this.
Of course, if there's further headwinds, this will be offset by our own actions. Let's then move to capital allocation and CapEx. If we look at our recent history, we have invested a lot. We now have what it needs to grow. We don't need to invest to capture growth. We need to bring what we have invested in on stream and make that productive. We have a couple of years behind us with more than EUR 1 billion in CapEx investments per year. This year, we are coming down to somewhere between EUR 730 million-EUR 790 million. Next year, it will actually be lower. It will be below EUR 600 million. There are two reasons for us to be convinced that this is the direction and this is the right thing to do. One is again that we have what's needed. We have made significant investments.
We don't need to make significant investments now going forward. The other one is that we have worked quite a lot in the last few months on just the CapEx strategy, how we run CapEx, how we approve investments, how do we categorize our different assets. We've looked at all of our assets. We've looked at all of our sites, all of our mills, and we categorize those into four categories ranging from run for cash to key. They have different investment profiles. From a cultural perspective, we will work on taking pride in running our assets for cash. So it's not just about investing and being proud of a new shiny machine, but it's also about what the return is and being proud of the run for cash mills.
We have Matthias Friedrich, a fantastic colleague who's dedicated to looking into this, done a lot of work the last few months just to set up this new framework for being efficient in how we invest in CapEx going forward. From CapEx to cash flow, and here you see a similar picture, the inverse of CapEx. We have invested a lot that has pushed down our cash flows the last few years, and we are now turning the corner when it comes to cash flow. We take CapEx down. That's clearly one factor. The margin through our own actions will pick up. We have the Oulu board machine and also the Lier coming on stream being the kind of revenue uplift part here. Turning the corner when it comes to cash flow. How do we use that cash going forward?
Again, pushing the message of disciplined capital allocation, taking down debt, very important. That is what we are going to work on, and that is what we are going to do to get to the one-time target. Shareholder return, the dividend, and then with, you can say in simple terms, when there is excess money, yes, we will do strategic investments, but we will scrutinize those strategic investments. Here and now, it is about investing in efficiency and optimization, less than growth, but the point being here that it is in this order and investments will be scrutinized. On net debt and balance sheet strength, as said, we are taking down, determined to take down the net debt to conservative levels. We are well aware of the target being quite conservative, and we are actually proud of that. We are happy about that.
That's where we want to take this company, to be safe, sailing safely throughout any market environments going forward. We actually peaked in net debt this year, 2025, on the back of the big investments that we made that are now or have come to an end. We took down net debt by roughly EUR 800 million through the 12% sale of Swedish forest. Now we are taking the next steps, the next couple of years and moving down towards that one or preferably even below one times net debt to EBITDA. Again, very much in our own hands, not relying on market picking up or some external factors. Just to wrap this up, this is in our own hands. We take pride. We have the P&L responsibilities.
We have the people who can turn this ship not only around, but towards that 4% or more growth, 10% EBIT margin, dividend distribution, and then a conservative balance sheet on net debt level. We have what it takes. It's in our own hands and will drive profitable growth. We will work or continue to strengthen the cash conversion. We will be more disciplined than in the past and very disciplined when it comes to capital allocation, safeguarding shareholder returns, dividends, and then the healthy balance sheet. Thank you. Hans, back on stage.
Thank you very much, Niclas, but Hans as well, obviously. Now we're actually open already for the Q&A. There we have very eager hands already up. A couple of instructions first. If you are here in person, first of all, raise your hand and then we will bring the microphone to you. Please limit yourself to first one question, maybe a follow-up. Also, please remember to introduce yourself. Those ones who are joining via the webcast, you have the button ask question next to the stream. Please submit your questions through that. With this, I think we can start. Actually, I have one opening question before we open it for the people here. Hans, this is for you. It's about our culture. What is the largest cultural shifts that you have worked with internally in a way to implement these efficiency improvements already?
It's absolutely our 4A concept. The day when I was appointed as CEO, I had an all-employee call. I said that, hey, now we will start focusing on profitability, cash flow, deleveraging the company. More importantly, this is a great company with great foundations. The only thing I see we need here, we need a performance culture. I knew I will get the question. Hans, what do you need? What do you mean by 4A performance culture? Therefore, I had, in order to remember myself what I mean with it, I had developed this 4A concept. It's an ambition. It's that continuous improvement mindset. It's not enough that we are average or status quo is not an option. Always we want to be the best in everything we do. Customer satisfaction, quality, operations, efficiencies, cost competitiveness, profitability. That needs to be the high ambition level everywhere throughout our whole organization. Then agility.
That's extremely important, especially in a cyclical industry because it's about being proactive, being close to customers, knowing what the competition is doing, making proactive, fast decisions, implementing with speed and determination instead of always being late in the cycle. You can win or lose a lot of money in a cyclical industry depending on the proactivity and the speed. It is analytical approach. It's all about data-driven decision-making. It's not about who is the CEO and who is not or who has worked for the company for 30 years and someone only three months. No, it's facts, figures, analysis. That is the basis for all decisions. Last but not least, accountability. Clear roles and responsibility, clear measurements, key performance indicators, decentralized P&L responsibility. We have now, with the new organization in place since July 1st, 24 new P&L responsible business units.
All the mill integrates, the former mill managers, they are today business unit leaders. They are accountable not only for the costs of their unit, but they are accountable for the EBIT, the bottom line of what they are doing. That is, they are being challenged every month. We, Niclas and myself, we have something that we call monthly performance meetings. Our colleagues, everybody else calls it the monthly barbecue. They participate there and will go through what was good, where have we proceeded, where are we lacking behind, why, what are the corrective actions, and so forth. Improving profitability and performance is not really rocket science, but it's really about culture. That's the key.
Thank you.
Lars Kjellberg, Stifel. Coming back to Niclas, one of your initial comments, you talked about the issues of Stora, one being capital allocation as one of the things that needs to change. The question is really that capital allocation has also been the driver for growth. How do we then square up, continue to have that 5% growth with lesser capital? The one thing that kind of was missing from the new KPIs was actual return. On the investments you've done thus far, the returns have been pretty dismal, and you have, of course, written off a huge amount of assets. Again, the question is really, how do we square up the continuation of that growth bigger than the market with lesser CapEx? Why did we miss the return metric in the KPI?
Yeah. I'll start with the latter one. The return. Yes, I mean, return matters. Return on our investments matters. We went through that internal discussion that, okay, return on capital employed, EBIT, EBITDA, what measure to have. Return on assets when we make investments, return on the daily business matters also going forward. Roughly speaking, the 10% EBIT is in line with 13% return on capital employed. That is kind of the rough math there. We are not forgetting it as such, but EBIT is clearly just an easier measure for everyday management, for people to understand day in, day out. Again, not forgetting about returns. We will scrutinize returns also for CapEx, for instance, scrutinize returns for all investments we do. Similar requirements, hurdles there that it needs to meet the overall company ambition or be higher.
Building on that, the 10% equaling 13% return on capital employed and the growth aspiration, I mean, we have invested heavily. We have the largest modern consumer board line now ramping up. We have actually the world's largest corrugated manufacturing plant acquired with De Jong, where there is also a ramp-up ongoing. We still have a lot of capacity to fill. After that, in fact, if we do the same thing that we have done in Beihai in all our board mills, we will have another 500,000 ton of board capacity. There is a lot we can do still through our internal efficiency, organic growth. We are well invested for the next five years, meaning that, of course, there can be some investments we will do in order, for instance, to reduce our costs, improve our competitiveness. Still, looking ahead for the next five years, we are very well invested to support at least that 4% annual growth.
Yes, Oskar Lindström with Danske Bank. I mean, the Swedish forest lands are a huge sort of value event for you and for shareholders and investors. I mean, the enterprise value or the book value of the forest lands in Sweden is like half of the enterprise value of Stora Enso. Now, if we look at forest land companies, both others in the Nordics, but also in North America, they generally trade at a discount and sometimes quite a steep discount to the book value when they're on sort of equity market. What can you do both in terms of structuring the sort of future relationship between the forest lands and your industrial operations and also in terms of boosting yield in your Swedish forest lands between now and, I suppose, the delisting to ensure that that discount is as small as possible or perhaps not even a discount at all?
Yeah, maybe I'll start. As you see here, I mean, we are actually super excited about this split that we are working on, and we see a lot of value in it. I mean, of course, again, back to shareholder value, that's one part of it, but the other part is then focusing on the business, having its own management, having its own kind of freedom to operate. Hans mentioned about some of those things that the forest company can do, which is on top of what we already do as a company. Of course, exactly as you say, those are the things that we will start working on and over time will maximize. This is a unique asset.
I mean, it's a really pure play forest asset. Many of the others or some of the others, there's not too many around in the world, and especially not in Europe, are not pure play. Yes, it will be a bit wait and see where the value lands. Of course, that's in your hands. We are true believers that this will be an exciting asset to own and have. Of course, yes, we'll work on it relentlessly now during the year to come. We saw it also during the sale of the 175,000 hectares.
I mean, there was a great interest, especially among institutional investors, because they want to have that return profile, very predictable, very stable. Also for them, the whole sustainability aspect is important that this 1.2 million hectares ties up 1.5 million tons of CO2 was also quite important. This partial sale of 12% of our Swedish forest land really encouraged us when we saw the great interests among especially institutional investors. We feel good about establishing this Europe's leading pure play listed company around forest, which does not exist today. There is nothing really comparable in Europe. In the U.S., there is some a little bit similar, but not in Europe. On the independence, which is a very important part, I mean, we are creating two fully independent standalone companies.
Yes, of course, there is a joint business interest going forward as well, but both need to stand on their own. Both need to be strong companies, strong balance sheets, strong businesses, and have the independence to do. I mean, yes, Forestco will have Stora Enso as a big customer. We have the wood supply agreement being developed, but also develop other customer relationships, as Hans mentioned, over time. Independence is very important.
Thank you. Andy Jones from UBS. Just another question about the asset base. I mean, clearly you are trying to maximize the investments that you have made in the past. In such an oversupplied market, the consumer board market, in which you're obviously market leaders, I appreciate your cost curve position is pretty low, but as the largest producer in a lot of these grades, given the lack of closures from some of your higher cost peers, is it enough to say we're going to sweat the assets and drive down costs when in an oversupplied market, quite often everyone's doing the same thing, prices just fall with it? As market leaders, should you not do more to help to address that overcapacity in some of your main markets?
There is, first of all, if we look at carton board, European carton board capacity, there is roughly 1 million ton of carton board capacity that is higher cost than our single highest cost production line. It is not enough to look at the virgin fiber carton board. There is almost as big white line chipboard market, which is recycled fiber based. There are some examples actually we spoke there about, and I showed the pizza boxes there. One of the pizza boxes is produced out of recycled fiber based white line chipboard. It is a 3 million ton market in Europe.
There is the same pizza box or similar pizza box produced out of our folded box board. In fact, the folded box board, our all folded box board looks much better. It is whiter, it is cleaner, it has the same stiffness properties, better printing properties, but it is 40%-50% lighter. The customer, when moving from white line chipboard to our folded box board, actually can buy 40%-50% less tons and get the same or better package, lighter package.
It is not only about the carton board segment as such, it is also to look beyond. We have lots of similar examples, for instance, in the U.S. to replace SBS with this folded box board where we produce the board in several layers with different types of fibers, microfibers, and so forth to really get that bulk stiffness with significantly lower basis weight. We are quite optimistic about the strength of our product offering and how we will be able and how we are able to penetrate the market and gain market share. That is actually what we have been doing throughout this year. Compare us with competition. We have been growing and most of our competitors are shrinking. That comes from competitiveness, not only cost competitiveness, but quality competitiveness, customer focus, working closely with customers. I truly believe we have a clear competitive advantage here. We will continue to build on that.
I will take one question from the webcast in the meantime. How much of the current market weakness do you think ballpark is due to weak cycle and how much, call it structural, as the industry has expanded capacity too much?
I mean, it is a cyclical industry. I have been 35 years in the pulp, paper, forest industry. These kinds of situations are always there. Because it is cyclical, demand is cyclical, and every now and then there can be in some segments some overcapacity. At some point it melts away. You need to look at the longer term. We strongly believe that we have the assets, the very cost competitive, well invested assets. We have the very attractive product offering. We have what it takes to be a winner and to continue.
It is not about anything new here. It is really about continuing what we have been doing throughout the last 10 years. We have been growing our packaging business more than 5% per year. Now we are saying that we are going to grow 4% per year. Earlier, the last decade, we have grown roughly double the growth rates of the market. Now we say with all the plastic substitution and what is forecasted when it comes to migration from plastics to renewable materials, we are going to grow 4% instead of perhaps a 3% market growth. We truly believe that we have what it takes to grow this company and to expand our margins at the same time.
Johannes Grunselius here, SB1 Market Stockholm. I am a bit curious about what you revealed here today regarding own actions, EUR 500 million-EUR 700 million step up. You mentioned there are worry sources, variable cost, fixed cost, commercial excellence, and so forth. Could you kind of indicate how much of this benefit is fixed cost? Also, if you can mention the time frame, are you talking about years or is it more one, two years here?
It is a fairly balanced, without going into exact percentages here, but it is fairly balanced between operational, so working in the mills, many of the examples Hans mentioned. Within sourcing, there is a significant potential. This is one area I am super excited about. We have our new sourcing head actually joining next week, and we will grab this head on. It is not like we have not done anything, but there is a lot still to do in sourcing. On the commercial side, mixed driving, mixed, for instance, of course, pricing. Then, as you say, fixed costs.
Fixed costs we are working on as we speak. We had personnel was affected here the last, or has been affected the last couple of weeks. Even if that's not a particularly nice thing, it's a must-to-do thing, and that will actually continue also during next year. I would say, without giving you an exact answer, fairly balanced. On how quickly, I mean, we will do this as quickly. We will really push for it. The time frame we gave here now is a couple of years. Call it two years or so, two to three years.
Yeah, the previous fixed cost FTE reduction, we could do like through just doing more with less. One of the drivers for the organizational change as from July 1st was that we realized that to take the next step in fixed cost reduction, we need to work in a new way. We need to reorganize the way how we are working, our processes and so forth. That is now what we are carrying on. We haven't made one big announcement like some others in the marketplace, but you have read throughout the autumn here, you have read news from all our mills about collaboration negotiations, reductions, and so forth. This continues in every part of our organization.
Yes, hi, Robin Santavirta, DNB Carnegie. Now, you have invested in growth, now, as you showed, quite a lot of money, several years. Now you drive down that CapEx to 26 to, I think Niclas said, less than EUR 600 million. Now, sometimes when companies do that, they have one year lower CapEx, and then they go back to the high CapEx. How should we look at 2027, 2028? Is this a little bit of a longer sort of pause in growth investments, or is it just one year sort of breather? Thanks.
It's not one year only. I mean, we are, again, how we allocate capital, we are renewing that. We are strengthening our scrutiny, making sure that the returns are there. So without giving an exact figure for 2027, 2028, but you should see this as a bit of a continuation rather than a one-off.
It's Linus Larsson with SEB. It seems to me that of the new financial targets, probably the net debt to EBITDA target is the one with the greatest impact in the immediate near term, however, I'm a bit curious just to understand, and I think it said on your last slide, Niclas, that you said it's within a two-year time frame. I'm curious to hear how much of this leverage reduction is actually the net debt level and how will that come down. How much of debt will be put into the forest company? How much is relating to potential divestment and other sources if we assume that the EBITDA level is stable at the current level?
Yeah. You're absolutely right. The assumption, and that's by the way for these targets overall, the assumption is that these are stories and long-term targets with Forestco moving into its own company. That's the kind of basis for the targets. Thus, of course, there is an assumption that a portion of the debt or the debt is being split in a sensible way, and a portion of the debt is carried by the forest company and Stora Enso is left with less debt than if we would not have done the demerger.
The exact amount is something that we will come back to. Of course, we have thoughts, we have plans, but we do not want to give you an exact number now, which a month or two months later is slightly different. I mean, this is actually one important thing with the demerger: the tax efficiency or tax-free demerger kind of typical way how they are done in Sweden and Finland. This we want to safeguard. One of the things that are required to do it as a tax-free demerger is a certain split of the balance sheet.
There are certain tax rules governing that, how much debt can you put on one side or the other. It is not completely kind of just up to us to make up a number. What is important, what we have said all along from the very get-go in the summer when we announced this, is that we are determined to create two strong companies. This goes for debt as well. There will be suitable amounts of debt in both companies. We are not going to kind of favor one part or the other. Two strong companies, investment-grade, strong investment-grade companies.
I will take in between one question from the webcast as well. This is once again also about the forest. With a new completely independent pure play, how will the forest strategy change as profitability is the main goal rather than providing cheap and quick pulpwood for the mother company?
Yeah, I mean, it's all about business focus. I mean, looking for, we have this asset, how can we maximize the value and how can we accelerate the value appreciation? There will be much more focus on the new revenue streams through the focus. We are convinced, we have seen it already throughout the process, the work with Tuomas and his team that actually when they look at this as a company to be listed, there are new aspects coming into it, new ways of accelerating value appreciation and income.
Thank you.
Morning, Hans and Niclas. Thank you very much for your time. It's Reinhardt from Bank of America. I just want to go back to capital allocation again. I appreciate that for the next few years you're, I suppose, harvesting deleveraging. To achieve that above market growth rate in the very long run, what are some of the portfolio tweaks and portfolio reinvestment plans that you have sort of on the shelf, so to speak, that you need to look at longer term for the business?
Yeah, we don't have any immediate big investment plans. We have some ideas how we can improve the cost competitiveness of some of our mega sites, the key mills as we have them classified. That is something we are looking into. We will continue to invest even more than before in customer-centric innovation, product development. This year, 60% of our paperboard sales comes from new products.
We want to accelerate that even further because we see the added value and we see how we can win with customers through new innovative products that are, for instance, offering a 40-50% yield advantage or that can help customers to reduce their carbon footprint 70%. This is a really, really important part of our winning with the customer strategy.
Hello, Andrés Castaños from Berenberg. What is your expectation for the net carbon footprint of the operating company once you have sold the forest assets?
Yes, we are reporting our CO2 emissions and we have a target to be carbon neutral by 2040. We have said that we want to reach - 50% CO2 reduction, emission reduction by 2030 compared to 2019 as the base year. Now, as you probably have seen from our Q3 report, we are already at - 60% in scope one and two, and we are at - 39% in scope three. We have basically reached that 2030 target already. This scope one and two and this CO2 emission reduction, it's really from our total supply chain. It does not include the benefit we have from our forests.
It does not include the 40 million tons by replacing non-renewable materials with renewable materials. It is really what is coming from our mills, logistics, food transports to the mill, mills product transported to customers. We have great examples. For instance, our Oulu mill is nearly carbon neutral. We have managed to take down carbon emissions by 90% in this unit. The forest divestment, first of all, and then the demerger of forest does not affect this. It's only the supply chain CO2 emissions.
Morning, Cole Hathorn from Jefferies. Hans, just like your thoughts on why you included the 4% per annum top-line growth target, because if I think about the industry historically, I think companies, analysts, consultants, we all overestimated demand, added too much capacity to the industry. There's a lot of latent capacity in the industry that needs to be utilized. I imagine near-term your focus has got to be returns and profitability. How does the top-line growth number impact your decision and the divisional management's decisions to make sure that they're not incentivized at capacity when they should be utilizing what they've got available to make sure that you're driving returns rather than focusing on a top-line rather than value accretive growth rather than just sales growth?
I do agree with you. I mean, our main objective is really to generate profits. That's the key thing. Actually, growing top-line also drives improvements in EBIT. My view on looking at the value of a certain company includes the top-line development growth. Growth is important. As I said, last 10 years, packaging, over 5% growth in Stora Enso. We have demonstrated our strengths and capabilities, and we are going to continue on that path.
If you really want to maximize the value of your company, you need to demonstrate over-the-market growth rates, which are also driving improved EBIT margins, which are also driving a higher EBIT or EBITDA multiple in terms of valuation. Therefore, growth is important. Of course, it's all there in order to improve our bottom-line profits.
A 10% EBIT margin of a bigger turnover is much more than 10% of a smaller top-line. I think the mathematics works both in terms of driving EBIT improvement as well as driving the valuation of the company, demonstrating that continued growth and margin expansion at the same time.
Just to add to that, again, repeating what we've said, I mean, we have what it takes to grow this above 4%. I mean, yes, maybe not for the next 20 years, but for here and now and the next number of years, we have what it takes. This 4% or above 4% target is not driving CapEx, for instance. We have what it takes.
Thanks, Antti Koskivuori, Danske. Niclas, you mentioned complexity as one of the challenges. You're addressing that with the strategic review of the European sawmills. Could you talk a little bit about that topic? How do you see it? How much you can achieve with these potential actions and whether there's further to go? Is this like a start of a journey or are these planned actions already enough?
It is really all about how you drive efficiencies in our company. Because on July 1st, we reorganized so that the pulp and board mills and the nearby sawmills, which are actually synergistic and supporting the board making, which is the core of our activity. They are reorganized into business units, P&L responsible business units. That is why the northern sawmills, they are now each part of a business unit, board and pulp business unit. These Central European sawmills and CLT plants, there are seven sites, they are not synergistic with our core business. As they say, first comes strategy, then comes structure. That is what we have done.
This is an attractive totality in any case. Also with international distribution units in the U.S., Australia, and so forth. We are sure that there will also be a lot of interest to getting into this, getting a world-leading position in cross-laminated timber. It is a very different business. Therefore, also here, we build Stora Enso around the core, which is really renewable packaging. That is where our strengths are and that is where we have invested. That is where we have grown during the last decade and that is where we are going to continue to grow. We do not have any further plans. I think with these, we are quite focused as a renewable materials company with strong and increasing packaging focus.
Pallav Mittal from Barclays. A question on your revenue growth target of 4% and the confidence that you will probably continue to outperform the market, which I think you said will grow around 3%. What gives you that confidence given that you are now going to focus less on growth CapEx? Is it more like substitution from plastic, from other paper grades, new customers, new geographies? Can you just elaborate on what gives you that confidence to gain more market share in the near term?
Yes. First of all, we are continuing on what we have done before during the last 10 years, 5% growth. We have extremely well-invested competitive asset base. We have the most compelling, the broadest product offering. We see that we can gain new customers, new business through our product development, like the example with the pizza boxes, getting business from white line chipboard moving to our folded box board. The customer saves money because he can buy 40%-50% less volume and still get better properties to the box.
It is really through innovation and product development to expand the whole addressable market and to develop new businesses and new relationships. Looking at that 4% growth, looking at how well invested we are, how much capacity we have, how much state-of-the-art technology we have, what kind of a product offering we have, global reach, customers operating in 60 countries, I think it is a relatively still conservative target as such.
We are going to have one of the last questions now and wrapping up soon, but go ahead.
Yeah, question on the forest demerger. It may seem like three questions, but it's one question. On the demerger, it's 100% to Stora Enso shareholders that you're envisaging. You're not going to keep any 20%. If not, why don't you just sell a billion or 200 million hectares again and get to your one-time net debt to EBITDA and have one less target, less to worry about? Why are you still kind of preempting that? You also said that it's going to be tax-free for Stora Enso, but will it be tax-free for Stora Enso shareholders as well? Because if you say to Germany, you'll have a dividend tax. Are you thinking about that in terms of structuring the transaction?
Yeah, no, good question. Yes, just to be clear, when we talk about a demerger spin-off listing, it is a 100% distribution to our current shareholders or at that time shareholders. As a shareholder, instead of owning one Stora Enso share after the demerger has happened, I own two shares. I own a forest company share and a Stora Enso share. That distribution, when we talk about tax-free or tax-efficient, at least, maybe that is a better term, that is from a shareholder perspective, also company.
Shareholder perspective, that is what I was kind of referring to. Of course, you are right that it depends a bit in which jurisdiction you are. I cannot promise tax-free for everyone. It depends on where you are. Looking at past similar transactions, tax-free is an important aspect from a shareholder perspective. On to kind of the, why do not you sell EUR 1 billion or EUR 2 billion or EUR 3 billion or EUR 5 billion? I mean, we are not doing this transaction to de-lever. We are doing this transaction because we truly believe it will create value.
It will create value for the shareholders and it will create value for the two companies. I mean, yes, then the debt will be split. Again, we'll come back to the exact kind of amounts. The driver for this is to create two strong companies, which are actually better than the combined ones from a shareholder perspective. Also from an operational perspective, both from a more focused Stora Enso, I was referring to the complexity. This will be a more focused Stora Enso industrial company. With all the good things the forest company can do, having that independence, that public scrutiny, all the new opportunities and so on. That's the main driver rather than just selling a billion and de-leveraging.
Thank you, first of all, to you guys, but also to the great questions you sent both via the webcast and then here. We will now have a break and we can continue these discussions during the break. We will continue at 11:15 A.M. With the webcast listeners as well, please rejoin us then. With these words, thank you very much.
If you can jump inside my mind, if you can read between the lines and find a center of the maze I've been trying to find on this frequency. I'm also someone that is pulling me, oh, into the ocean. I might be floating on this frequency. On this frequency. Bomba do, bomba do, badoo badoo. Bomba do, bomba do, badoo badoo. Bomba do, bomba do, badoo badoo. Bomba do, badoo badoo badoo badoo. Frequency, frequency, frequency. I'm also someone that is pulling me into this music. Now I am floating on the low too sea. I feel the power of our energy, energy, energy, energy. Energy, energy, energy, energy.
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I always say the wrong thing. It doesn't matter anyways. Ain't nothing gonna change, no. I hate the situation. I'm always running into you. When I don't, I'm hoping to. I hate feeling so confused. Don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. Don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. I hate that you're perfect. Know it, your ass comes out so clean. Somebody's taking tricks on me. Can't see what I want to see. I hate that you still call me. Just when I done made up my mind to leave your perfect ass behind, I hear you sounding so fine. Don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. Don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. I know it's just what I'm going through.
Baby, don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. Feel the way I do. Don't want to feel the way I do. Just what I'm going through. How else can I let you go when the man I know makes me want to be your girl? I want to be out living the love I save, fighting days of wait. Oh, I want to be your girl. I just want to be. Just want to be your girl. Your girl. I hate that I can't tell you that I've kept something you never know and try not to let it show. Mind games just to let you go. I hate that you don't want it. I hate that I'm still so sweet as if in my heart chained something. When you're ready, you'll remember me. I hate I know your birthday.
I know all of your favorite shit. When you were drunk and I was next to it, yeah, I still can't swallow it. I hate that you don't call me. I'd like to think that we're still cool. You know I feel like a fool. Every time it rains, I hold you too. I hate that I was so good to you. I'd be so good for you, good for you. I'm all I'm going for you, good for you. Because I'm good to you, sweetheart. I was so good to you, good to you. I'd be so good for you, good for you. I'm all I'm going for you, good for you. Because I'm good to you, sweetheart. I just want to be free. I'd be so good for you, good for you. I just want to be free. Just what I said. I just want to be free.
I need that. I just want to be free. I will say just what I just want to be free. I just want to be free. Although it does not bother me now, I still recall the summer, the summer of 1999. If you want to turn, we will be just fine. I will be alright. I will be alright. If you want to learn, we will be alright. I will be alright. I will be alright. The days are getting longer. No more hiding inside. Beauty makes me wonder. Should this be the time of our lives? We are acting like we should be. Do you really feel this way? 'Cause if you are so happy, how come you never dare stop, babe? If you want to turn, we will be just fine. I will be alright. I will be alright. If you want to learn, we will be alright. I will be alright. I will be alright.
It goes like this. Saw you looking at my baby. Caught you stepping with your boys across the room. You can come a little closer. I won't hurt you, but my friends are leaving soon. We can boogie till the morning and do the things we're supposed to do. You know that you're feeling me, so don't take a brain check when the skies are blue. Thinking tonight I'd dance alone. I don't mind being on my own. Hold up a bright white feeling sign. Turn around as I pass you by. With a face like that, boy, I really don't mind. We could have starlight in your eyes. Lost in the music, flashing lights. Ain't it another fading night? Don't fight or hesitate 'cause, boy, don't you make it feel bright. Saw you looking at my baby.
Caught you stepping with your boys across the room. You can come a little closer. I won't hurt you, but my friends are leaving soon. We can boogie till the morning and do the things we're supposed to do. You know that you're feeling me, so don't take a rain check when the skies are blue. Don't you take a rain check when the skies are blue. Clear skies, clear skies up. Clear skies, clear skies up. Clear skies, clear skies up. Clear skies, clear skies up. Whoa, clear skies, clear skies up. Don't you take a rain check. Clear skies, clear skies up. Clear skies, clear skies up. Clear skies, clear skies up. Saw you looking at my baby. Caught you stepping with your boys across the room. You can come a little closer. I won't hurt you, but my friends are leaving soon.
We can boogie till the morning and do the things we're supposed to do. You know that you're feeling me, so don't take a brain check. It's easier said today or far away. How could you do this? Who made you be this comfortable? Am I as dull to let it all come down to this? I've bathed in the potions you rid of prior hearts. Failures detected, but now I wasn't all in. It's serious condition. Impulsive desire harming. The scam is wildfire after all this time. How was I supposed to know? Tell me, will it happen one day? Stuck like cash and so connected. What is to affect it? It's easier said today or far away. How could you do this? Who made you be this comfortable? Am I as dull to let it all come down to this? Don't count me. Don't count me.
Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. The many times needed saving. Countless wounds of love. And my stories got better. See, I was back at square one. Is it me? Still hang on to the would've, could've beens. See, I'm this close to a new mess. 'Cause I broke my rules once again. It's easier said today or far away. How could you do this? How can you do this? Who made you be this comfortable? Am I as dull to let it all come down to this? Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. I'll be alright. Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. Don't count me. In this city, there are so many faces you can go insane. I'm still so lonely, I'm about to faint. I don't faint easily.
Absurdities give my head the freeze. So crowded still, I'm on my own. I'm on my own. I didn't know I could be so alone. I'm on my own here. I got the big city blues. I don't wanna stick around. I know that she knows this here is all concrete. I miss my little town. I know that she knows that she knows. I'm sorry, but these are twists of a mind in a social frost. Just give me seven seconds to gather my thoughts. It seems we're dealing solely with a social consciousness. I got no other shoulder to cry on but my own. No other but my own. Please, won't you bring me back home? I miss my home. Oh, I got the big city blues. I don't wanna stick around. I know that she knows this here is all concrete.
I miss my little town. I know that she knows I got the big city blues. I do not want to stick around. I know that she knows this here is all concrete. I miss my little town. I know that she knows that she knows. It takes so many faces to fill me up. I am way past the brim of this here cup. Ain't got no one to talk to. No one to hear me out. No one to do nothing but to be proud. I got the big city blues. I do not want to stick around. I know that she knows this here is all concrete. I miss my little town. I know that she knows I got the big city blues. I do not want to stick around. I know that she knows this here is all concrete.
I miss my little town. I know that she knows. I miss the houses. I miss the streets. I miss all the people that greet me with a smile. I miss the houses. I miss the streets. I miss all the faces that greet me with a smile. I miss the houses. I miss the streets. I miss all the people that greet me with a smile. I miss the houses. I need my check, player, run me what you want. Nothing less or more. I keep my cards closed on a meter, no, but you don't need to know. Ooh, baby, big blue faces on the western. They fall quick in my direction. That's why they sitting in my section. You know, yeah, every woman need no fashion. They know I'm a little sentimental. That's why they sitting in my section. You know, yeah.
Feel it breaking, burn me down. Feel it breaking, burn me down, babe. Show your world, show your world. Show you how to work it. Feel it breaking, burn me down. Oh, I see you learning. So professional. Ooh, so professional. Ooh, I said it, I said it, you know, you know, but you know, so you know, so you know. Check my bags, player, I'm gon' need receipts. I keep my thing on leash. You know that I don't sleep. It's business, don't take it personal. You don't need to know, know, know, know. Ooh, big blue faces on the western. They fall quick in my direction. That's why they sitting in my section. You know, baby, big bread, we don't need a blessing. No name, we don't need a guess, miss. You see sugar on a necklace. You know, baby, feel it breaking, burn me down.
Feel it breaking, burn it down, babe. I'm gonna show you how to work it, babe. Oh, I see you learning now. So professional, so professional, so professional. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you're only gonna tell me now. I know you. Oh, I see you learning. Ooh, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I know you got it where you want it now. I know you want it where you want it now. I know you want it, I know you want it now. Oh, I told you now. Feel it breaking, burn it down. Feel it breaking, burn it down, babe. I see you learning now. I know you learning now. I see you learning now.
Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had a refreshing break. As we continue on today's agenda, I'm pleased to introduce our next session, our business overviews. Joining us for the sessions is Andreas Birmoser, Carolyn Wagner, and Johanna Hagelberg, who will each share key insights and updates from their respective areas. Please join me in welcoming our business leaders to the stage as we dive into the next part of the program.
Packaging materials are nothing new, not to us, nor to you. Material performance, however, that's where we're changing the game. Our convictions are strong. Our commitments, even more so. Partnership and trust are at the core of our approach. Deep-rooted expertise, masterful efficiency, exceptional materials, absolute reliability. We co-create cutting-edge solutions to discern and address people's most fundamental needs, to turn simple, renewable packaging into something newsworthy. From old to new to renewable, we are Stora Enso, the Renewable Materials Company.
All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Andreas Birmoser, and I'm heading the Business Area Cardboard. Yesterday evening, I got a few questions where I come from, what I've been doing, so a few facts about myself. I've been with the company for over 20 years. I joined back in Brazil, my home country. The first 10 years, I spent in various finance roles: Greenfield Investments, production units, headquarters, as well as a business area. For the last 10 years, I decided to move away from finance and have been leading business development, innovation, one joint venture in Brazil, packaging material sales, until I got to the position I am today, which I've been holding for two years now, leading Business Area Cardboard. Today, I'm not here to talk only about cardboard. I want to talk about the whole consumer packaging business, which includes liquid packaging board and food service board.
This is our most important growth engine in the company, as Hans has already introduced before. I want to show you how we shape our strategies around consumer demands, customer needs, and how that will drive our growth moving forward and how that will help our value generation. I hope that by the end of this presentation, you'll see the same thing I see: that we are the best positioned in this industry to succeed and benefit from that growth. Let me get started. Hans mentioned about our strong positions. We are the European leaders in cardboard production and food service board, and we are the global leader in liquid packaging board. We are the company with the biggest and widest portfolio in consumer packaging, and that has a lot of benefits. I will highlight a few of them.
The first and most important one is probably the insight we get from different customers from beverages and food and how we translate that to innovation, like barriers. A lot of needs to develop barriers in food service and liquid packaging, but that can also spill over to cardboards. A good example is dispersion coating. There is a value in having that wide portfolio. We deal with many blue-chip customers, not only converters, but also brands. We have here Tetra Pak, SIG, Elo Pak, with whom we have been dealing for over 60 years. We also have brands like Nestlé, ABI, which provide us valuable insight from the market and the consumers. That helps us. We need those three parties to really develop the products, develop the materials to find the best solutions. That is very important.
As Hans said, this is a growing market, and let's start by looking to some of the numbers. Here on this chart, on the left-hand side, you will see the global projections of growth, and on the right-hand side, the European projections of growth. You will see that in both cases, virgin materials has a higher growth rate than recycled board. 1%- 1.5% will be driven by plastic substitution. That is a very important growth factor there. You also see on the European side, there is a temporary contraction of demand currently that has been spoken for before. We have an overcapacity of 800 million tons in cardboards. You also see that the growth towards 2030 is over 1 million tons. That is a growing market. Of course, we have now an overcapacity, which we will have to navigate through.
In order to succeed in such an environment, in my opinion, you need three things. You need to have a very strong cost position. You need to have entry barriers, and you need to have the best product and services. Those three things are crucial. I want to talk about those three things in my coming slides. I will start with our cost position. Again, on the left-hand side, you have the cost curve of folding box board, and on the right-hand side, you have the cost curve of the liquid packaging board. Here on FBB, you will see that we have around 70% of our capacity in the first and second quartile of the cost supply curve, while 100% of our capacity in liquid packaging board is in those quartiles. No other European producer has that high share of its capacity in that cost position.
That is going to be very important for our value creation. There are other two things which are important in this slide. One is, if you look at how much volume is more costly than our most costly machine, which is our smallest machine in Force, BM2, it is over 1 million tons. You have 1 million tons more expensive than our most costly machine. The market is growing over 1 million tons in the next four years. That is then how you need to play this out. Hans spoke about our value creation program, how do we continuously improve with the sprints where we have our experts in operations and sales joining our mills, joining our sales offices for weeks to just lift ideas. We have the PMO structure to make sure we execute a weekly cadence where we review the projects.
I'm personally involved in those weekly meetings. We remove the obstacles. We deep dive where we have to deep dive to make sure we make progress. With that, we have been shifting our cost position every day. That is very important. As I said, we do it based on data. We leave emotions out. As you heard, I come from finance, so I listen to data. That's what I do. I think that's the right thing to do in this scenario. That is going to be very important. I spoke about costs, then entry barriers. Let me talk about the four most important entry barriers. Hans mentioned the huge issue that is food waste. Therefore, the barriers to protect food are very, very important. We need to help to find the right solutions there.
Here, again, benefiting from our wide portfolio, we have been innovating and developing a lot of solutions. We probably have the widest barrier offering in the market. That is not something you come in and copy very easily. This takes years to develop. Our customers, trust. Trust is only built by repetitive steps, repetitive successes over a long period of time. That is then translated into two things. With many of our customers, we have long-term contracts, two to four years. What benefit does this bring? Predictability, certain price stability as well. Most importantly, it makes it difficult for others to come and enter. You do not copy that. There are the long lead times to really qualify this. The qualification process is very demanding. Sometimes it takes 6-12 months to qualify a new product.
If you come from the outside in and you want to play in the food or beverage industry, it's not going to happen that easily. Of course, fourth, but not last, but not least, you have the high CapEx. It's not only about building an asset, right? We just invested in a new machine in Oulu, EUR 1 billion investment. You need to have the whole environment around you with forests, harvesting, transportation. It's not something you copy that easy. With all those things, it's going to be very difficult to see more capacity coming in Europe in the next years. We have invested while there was a window to invest, and now we can benefit from that growth. I spoke about cost, entry barriers. Let's look into products.
Here you will see on the bottom side of the chart that renewable fibers or fiber-based packaging has a growth rate which is twice as big as plastic packaging. A lot of the growth will come from plastic replacement, especially in Europe. Europe is driving most of that because here is where the legislation is more advanced. PPWR, SUPD, you name it. It is going to kick in really strong now in 2030. That is driving a lot of the growth. You need to have the right products. I spoke about barriers and how we develop them together with our customers. One good example is ultra-thin PE. If you think about those drinking cups, we have managed to keep the plastic content under 5% by having very thin layers of PE.
It is compliant with legislation, and it opens a market for us because we will be there with the solution that works. Others probably do not. That is going to be very important. Another important topic is lightweighting. Why is lightweighting important? You need to do more with less. If you want to replace plastic, it is not just going to happen because we want it to be renewable. It needs to be cost competitive. It needs to work in the filling lines. For that, lightweighting is a great tool because you can do more with less. You can remove cost not only from materials, but also from logistics. Here I will give you a few examples from our new machine in Oulu. If you look at what we do with our folding box board in the new machine in Oulu.
We have our patented technology called FiberLiteTech, where we introduce microfibrillated cellulose on the mid-ply of the board. That increases its stiffness and resistance. That gives us up to 8% yield advantage. It sounds like not much, but it is a lot. It saves a lot of cost in the process. If you compare, for example, our folding box board from Oulu to the North American SPS, we are up to 18% more efficient in yield. Not only that, we have a 50% lower CO2 footprint, even landed in the US. That is because of the energy matrix we use in our mills and how we transport it to North America. That resonates a lot with the brands, which are ultimately the ones which are deciding what to use. We actually help them to achieve their targets.
That is why we have been increasing our efforts in talking directly to brands and retailers and not only to converters. We need those three parties involved in that change. Another interesting aspect, and Hans has this good habit of stealing many of my lines. He does it over and over again. He talked about pizza boxes, right? He mentioned that the white line chipboard market is a 3 million ton market. If you take Oulu and our products in Oulu, and you convert instead of looking at cost per ton and looking at cost per square meter or cost per box, the products from Oulu will be positioned in the first quartile of the cost supply curve of white line chipboard. Why is that? We can achieve up to 40%-50% yield advantage compared to white line chipboard.
I asked my colleagues to circulate now some of those samples so you can see it with your own eyes. That one specifically, this one is you all have seen that frozen pizza boxes, white line chipboard material. This one developed based on our own products, 37% lighter, white inside. This one is gray inside. Better printing surface, better printability, better runability on the machines. White line chip material, you stop the converting and the printing line every X hours, hours once for a full day. You bring a lot of efficiency to the process. That is a market which now with our investments and our cost position in Oulu, which is now addressable for us. We do not only compare virgin to virgin, but we will also replace white line chipboard. Back to the U.S., I mean, yes, tariffs are there.
We have not seen the end game. Again, with our yield advantage and with our value proposition on CO2, we have seen that our customers are willing to talk and willing to share that with us. Why is that? If you think about it, put yourself in the roles of a converter in the U.S. or a brand in the U.S., and you say, "Let us all, the Europeans, get out of the U.S. because of the tariffs." What happens? You shift all the power to the hands of the oligopoly that you have there, the two big players which have 80%-90%. I guess you all know what happens to prices in that scenario. That understanding is there, and we see that the customers are willing to talk to us. Right?
With that solution, with those boards, we will be able to compete not only with white line chipboard, but also with plastics. You all travel, you all go to supermarkets, right? Think about how much plastic you see where plastic is not needed. A few examples. Here you have the 6 cans or 12 cans of beverages, beer, soda, drinks. In the past, all wrapped in shrink films. Now you start seeing them in boxes or with handles made out of cardboard. Think about tomatoes or vegetables. How much of the trays are plastic? You ask yourself, "Why plastic?" There is no good reason. Or the trays on biscuits. These are just a few examples. Those changes are silently happening, and they will continue to happen, especially now towards 2030 when legislation is kicking in.
Hopefully that gives you a bit of a glimpse that we have the right products and the right solutions and the strong cost position to fight this environment we are in right now. Talking about the machine in Oulu, EUR 1 billion investment, 750,000 tons of capacity. It is a swing mill. It will produce folding box board, but it will also produce CKB, as we call it. That is a beauty in itself. Why is that? Two main things. We have designed and developed Oulu based on the existing SKUs we have in Skoghall in Sweden or Force in Sweden. That gives us a security supply increase for our customers. They are really, really looking after that, especially with everything that has happened over the last years, strikes, shutdowns, you name it. They want that increased security supply. We can provide it now.
It also has another interesting aspect, which is this interchangeability means we will not grow 750,000 tons in cardboard. We will be moving products from our existing mills like Schukel to Oulu or Force to Oulu. That is roughly 150,000-200,000 tons in the coming years. Oulu allows us to debottleneck the whole portfolio. You can grow in liquid packaging by removing products from Schukel. You can grow in food service board by moving folding box board from Imatra. That allows us to play and reduce the risk of being exposed only to one grade. That is another important aspect to keep in mind. To talk about value creation first, we want to achieve over 10% EBIT. We are confident we can do that.
30% or 40% of that growth will be coming from structural changes, meaning the ramp-up of Oulu, and the other 60% of own actions. Hans mentioned a few of them. We have replaced the outer plies in Force with eucalyptus pulp, generating EUR 6 million in savings. Imatra, where we are running more efficiently our energy setup, another EUR 6 million. We have changed the recipes with blue chip customers, and that will have an uplift of 1% EBIT margin. In this lower volume scenario or this overcapacity scenario, we can allocate the products to the lowest cost assets for the time being, which is another great value creation possibility. What I am trying to say is there is no silver bullet. It is this new way of working, it is this new mentality that we have and that we continue to push.
We listen to data, we lift ideas, and we make sure we execute them. I have one machine and one mill an hour in my business area where we have cut over 10% of cost in the last 18 months. It is possible. We have done it. We have proven that we can do it. Good. To finalize, this is a growing market. It is growing organically. It is growing from plastic substitution. Now we are capable of also replacing the recycled board. It is a growing market. We have the right products. We have the right services. We have the right cost position to navigate through those times. Most importantly, we have the trust of our customers. As the examples I have given, some of them have been dealing with us for over 60 years.
With that and our new mindset, our new ways of working to continuously look for improvement, of never being satisfied, of always looking to be more ambitious, we are convinced that we will be achieving those targets in the next 2-3 years. With that, I pause here and I invite my colleague Karin on stage.
We are currently at the Imatra debarking plant in Finland. What we have been facing is a typical optimization problem. We were either peeling off more valuable fiber from the logs than we wanted to, or we left too much residual bark on the logs. Now we have installed cameras to monitor how much bark is left on the logs. Using AI, we are transferring the video data into tangible measurements. With that information, the AI can provide advice to the operators and steer the process.
It allows us to do the step towards the automation of the process, to steer the process autonomously during normal operations. The beauty of this solution is actually that it's highly scalable and can be applied to any debarking plant in our production sites. We have already taken it into use at nine sites already. This successful implementation of the debarking optimization solution has helped us cut costs and increase the yield of our production sites by nearly 1%. In times of high energy prices and raw material costs, such AI solutions are a game changer, and there is more to come.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I've spotted some ladies in the audience. Welcome. I'm Carolyn Wagner, and I'm heading up the business area packaging solutions for Stora Enso. To begin with, I want to share a personal secret with you. I love packaging. As a packaging engineer, I should. Hopefully today, I can transmit my enthusiasm also to you as we go through the segment container board and packaging solutions. Now, we have a lot to gain from where we stand today. I am convinced that we can drive growth and a meaningful EBIT margin uplift through our own actions.
We will shift our portfolio to higher margin products. We will integrate container board and packaging solutions for growth. We will scale up our automation and service offering. These actions will make a significant impact to our performance over the next two to four years. When you think about packaging, have you ever wondered what is so special about a box? Today, I want to show you how Stora Enso can turn a box into tangible shareholder value through technology insight and customer intimacy. Let us start from our strength.
Stora Enso is a leading producer of virgin fiber container board, complemented by a very competitive recycled offering. We are also a top-tier integrated company, mainly across Northern and Central Europe. We serve demanding customers, brand owners who value our quality, our reliability, and also our innovation. 80% of our sales is in Europe, but we are really a global supplier. We expand specifically in virgin container board, also into North and Latin America. This gives us both resilience and profitable growth opportunities beyond Europe. What are the markets in which we operate? Now, structural demand in our markets is intact. We expect the global virgin container board markets to grow by about 1% year on year through to 2035. Soon to exceed capacity. That is good news for Stora Enso.
With recent mill closures in North America, we European suppliers have a golden opportunity to gain global market share. European box shipments are steadily increasing, especially in Eastern Europe. This is a very strong fit with our integrated footprint. At this point, I would like to share our three strategic levers, which will help us win in this competitive market environment. Firstly, our low-weight kraft liner. Secondly, our footprint advantage. Thirdly, the expansion of the value chain. Let us start with our superior innovative lightweight kraft liner. It is a unique product from Stora Enso. Now, packaging sits at an intersection of two mega trends. Firstly, it is the shift from plastic to paper. Secondly, the push for lighter, lower carbon materials. This also drives corrugated demand in our target segments. This is where our superior lightweight kraft liner comes into play.
It offers better strength values at lower specific grammage. For our customers, this actually means 10-15% less material, up to 20% lower CO2 footprint, and a better box performance. This is important for our customers because most international brand owners, they have made a promise to you, to us, to the consumers. They have made a sustainability promise to us, and now they have to deliver on it. Now, Stora Enso can help them reach their targets. If we were to follow Andreas to the supermarket, we would also see that the boxes perform on shelf. Now, what does perform mean? They are strong, and they just look good. With this, they also enhance brand perception, which is also very important for our brand owner customers. Let's move on to the second lever, our integrated footprint. Now, our footprint is a real differentiator.
By co-locating container board mills and corrugated plants, we have integrated an efficient vertically integrated system. This actually minimizes transport, thus also reducing logistics costs and, again, lowers the carbon footprint. Now, our container board mill in Ostrołęka, it's a recycled container board mill, and it operates in the lowest cost quartile. It is ideally situated to our own corrugated plants. Actually, it sits on the same premises as our biggest corrugated plant in Poland, but also very close to our Baltics operations. With this, it's obvious to all of you that this creates a cost advantage if we compare to competitors. A cost advantage per ton, at the same time giving us higher service flexibility. This allows us to grow, and at the same time, it allows us also to protect our margins. What else does the integrated model do for us?
It is actually a natural hedge against market volatility. Because we have easy access to paper, we can optimize the capacity usage in the paper mill, and we can balance demand and supply across the cycle. Our third strategic lever, the expansion of the value chain. Now, we do not sell paper. We do not sell boxes. We provide packaging solutions. This end-to-end system, this is actually what we are targeting. We want to be a packaging solutions provider for our customers where design, data, and automation connect seamlessly. The success of our award-winning packaging solutions, that is also a very good selling argument for external container board customers. Again, we see and we can underline the importance of integration for the success in our business. If we recap, what are the three strategic levers which will help us win?
It's our low-weight kraft liner with higher strength property at lower CO2 emissions. It is our footprint advantage, which gives us a lower cost position and better proximity to our markets. It is the value chain expansion, which creates value for our customers. Those three together allow us to grow even in stagnant markets. Let's move on to something that really excites me as an engineer, automation. Look at this great case from Lumene. Lumene is a high-quality Finnish cosmetics producer. If you were to ask Lumene what packaging is for them, they would actually say it is nothing short of a growth engine. With our wrap-around packaging machine, we have actually replaced manual packing processes for 40 different products. This has increased efficiency. It has increased reliability, and it has also increased sustainability. You can't believe the success they have with this packaging line.
Really, it's great because they have now been able to expand their e-commerce business internationally. They even deliver as far as China. That is what automation did for them. For us, the customers who actually buy automation lines from us, they're typically 30%-40% more profitable than ordinary packaging customers. How can that be possible? It is possible because every installation actually deepens the customer relationship. It anchors both paper and box sales. It also gives us the opportunity to continue with further products, with further lines, and also with after-sales turnover. This is really the story I believe in. If you really want to see expansion of the value chain in practice, I would like to invite you to go to IKEA.
Maybe not on a Saturday afternoon like I did, but in the IKEA, you will see a lot of Stora Enso products. You will see Stora Enso container board, and you will also see Stora Enso corrugated boxes. If at the end, just before the exit, you can't resist those Swedish cookies, you will again meet Stora Enso packaging material packed probably in Stora Enso corrugated cases by a Stora Enso automation line. I have to admit, we don't bake the cookies. What are all these endeavors leading to? Of course, our goal is to grow EBIT margins significantly and become a more profitable business, also in integrated packaging. For one thing, we will do this through structural changes. Our major packaging site in De Jong will be ramped up to its optimal capacity. Secondly, we will do this through our own actions.
We heard about our own actions also from the other presenters. These are things that we control ourselves. Of course, again, we go from the technology, which means we will improve wood yield, fiber yield in our container board production, but also we will improve our performance, our productivity in the corrugated plants. Of course, we will take commercial actions. We have now discussed in the questions, how are you going to grow above the market? I believe that actually we can grow above the market because it's all about performance and customer trust, as you've also heard from my colleagues. This is also very, very true. We will also be much more customer-driven, customer-oriented in our corrugated plants, and thus we will be able to grow above the market. We're not waiting for the market to recover.
We're not waiting for the market to turn. We will turn it ourselves. To conclude, I believe that integrated packaging can be a real growth platform for Stora Enso. We unlock this potential via technology, circularity, and customer trust. We have leading assets also in containerboard and packaging solutions. We have really unique products, and we have a partner relationship with our customers, which is unrivaled. I believe that we will actually also play a winning game because I believe that with every box and with every customer, with every consumer, we make life a little bit better and a little bit more sustainable each and every day. I believe from Chinese New Year, beautiful box from China, through to Christmas Eve, every box is special. Thank you.
Brazil had a significant force productivity improvement in the past decades. In recent years, this progress has started to slow down. At Veracel, we managed to reverse this trend. With high-quality management, intensive use of technology, and data-driven management, we have grown around 30% in the last five years, now reaching more than 42 cu km per hectare per year of annual average increment. This productivity level not only places Veracel as a national reference, being around 35% higher than the national average, but also contributes around EUR 50 million annually to the company's results. This result is mainly explained for three factors: people development, genetic material improvement, and correct clone allocation. The result is clear: more productivity, less dependence on the external market, and more value generated for Veracel's future.
We are the renewable materials company with a strong focus on packaging. To make excellent packaging, you need pulp. That is where we come in. We are serving demanding customers with specialized pulp as well as new biomaterials. I am Johanna Hagelberg, leading the biomaterials business area. I will talk about three things: our portfolio, both in pulp business as well as in the new biomaterials. I will talk about the market, and I will talk about our clear actions to improve margins. Let's start with pulp. We produce pulp for everyday life. You wake up with pulp, you live with pulp throughout the day, and you go to bed with pulp from cradle to grave.
The eucalyptus pulp is going into packaging with our packaging business area sisters. It also goes into specialty applications and to tissue and growing into hygiene. We have the fluff pulp, which naturally goes into hygiene, all sorts of grades in hygiene. Both of these two have clear offering, clear competitiveness, and sustainability to our customers.
Thirdly, unbleached kraft pulp, where we actually are the largest in the world. I will come back both to the fluff and to the unbleached. This is serving our packaging business with natural-looking grades, natural-looking packaging appearance, but also new areas like electrotechnical, underpinning the electrification that we are going through. Also water purification with filtration and supporting the construction sector with fiber cement. That is our portfolio. This portfolio is already today at the low of the market, delivering 10% EBIT margin. Moving to the market then, we believe that the pulp market is healthy growing over time. In the core of the market, we have eucalyptus. In the base, we have softwood.
We have two very attractive growing segments, specialized pulp, which is the fluff pulp going into hygiene and demand-driven by urbanization, driven by aging population across all nations, as well as higher penetration of femcare as well as baby in developing markets. We have the unbleached specialized area as well, which is growing based on packaging and the wish for more natural-looking packaging. Also, as I said, the electrification with needs for more cables, more transformers across the globe. We believe that this market can offer another $10 billion roughly in additional revenue possibility, as well as an increased demand of pulp. Diving into eucalyptus, and you heard Marcio talk about the actions we have been doing at Veracel to improve our plantations and our genetic material, the trees.
Our eucalyptus is a significant contributor to Stora Enso and to our packaging sisters' profitability. They are underpinning the packaging BAs. Why? Because Montes del Plata are two of the most competitive modern production facilities in the world in producing eucalyptus pulp. They offer $150-$180 competitive advantage versus the average cost curve landed in Europe. Not only is the operation of producing pulp very efficient and continuously aiming for even lower cash cost, maintaining our position, it is also based on highly sustainable plantations where we are owning around 400,000 hectares divided between Brazil and Uruguay. These plantations are based on nurseries where we are aiming to improve every tree, new tree we plant are a little bit better than the previous one. I am just back from the climate conference in Belem.
There we have showcased, thirdly on this bullet here, the third bullet, our strong license to operate in Veracel and MDP. We have had panels around resilient communities because it is fundamental for us that the communities around the sites, which are of course consisting of employees providing income, but also developing the communities in terms of resilience, increased income on average, education, land to live on, has been fundamental. Resilient communities and climate resilient communities have been one of the showcases. The second showcase we have had at the climate conference has been around reforestation. In both Veracel and MDP, we have set aside almost half of our area to continue to preserve nature and reforest. Thirdly, last but not least, biodiversity to enable better fauna and flora and both maintain, but also increase fauna and flora where that is needed.
These very unique eucalyptus-producing companies that we have are then really helping with integration benefits. We are the only EU peer in packaging, like you heard Hans talk about, that have this possibility with own integration. Why is that better than just buying eucalyptus on the market? The reason is that we can supply consistent, sustainable eucalyptus to our very important customers in packaging, which means that this gives a perfect optimized fiber mix. The perfect optimized fiber mix gives process stability. Process stability gives stability of the quality of the board for our high-end brand customers. This is not only, though, advantageous for our packaging sisters. This is also super good for biomaterials business area because the integration offers us base demand regardless of the pulp cycle, meaning that we are less dependent on volatile spot markets as a business area and company.
Now I talked a lot about eucalyptus, and I promised to come back to the specialized grades. Here we have two grades that we are absolutely uniquely positioned in. Fluff, we are the largest producer in Europe, and we are basically the only significant producer in Europe. The rest of the fluff pulp in Europe is imported. We are long-term in this business. We've been here for over 50 years, and that is important in fluff because this is a highly technical grade with very narrow spec, and it's next to skin. It needs to be super safe and clean. As a curiosity, could you guess what the first grade was called? We started in 1969 with fluff. Revolutionary name, Stoera 69.
Here our customers are today appreciating us for high sustainability, the high quality, but also our possibility to innovate and develop the fluff pulp according to their needs. Moving from fluff then over to our unbleached grade, where the latest addition is the UKP Nova, as we call it. Here the Nova, or unbleached as such, offers 30% less carbon footprint simply due to less need for bleaching chemicals. My dream would be that all pulp would be less bleached. This is helpful in our packaging business, so we are already supplying Oulu, Beihai, and Skoghall with UKP to support their sustainably looking packaging. In addition to that, we have a growing new customer base within electrotechnical and electrification.
Here I have some product samples because when I heard about this, I said, "God on earth, what are you using that pulp for in the electrotechnical space?" I'm an engineer, so I'm somehow familiar to electrotechnical stuff. We are passing around here two pieces of board. Are they coming on that side as well? Yes, perfectly. There they are. One of them, the thinner one, that is what a pulp sheet looks like out of production. That is a base UKP pulp sheet. The other one that when you take a look at it, believe you will go to the construction store to buy, that is actually high-dense UKP. When you open up a transformer, you see more of that than the rest because everything needs to be insulated, isolated when it comes to electrotechnical applications.
This is a fantastic application supporting then the electrification. The reason why our UKP is so unique is due to its high cleanliness and then the very good quality. We are working here with new brand owners that are then supporting the growing electrification across the globe. It is not only good for electrification. It is also good for water filtration. Simplest application, I am not sure we think it is simplest, but the simplest application, coffee filter. Then much more advanced purification of air in cars, water purification, of course, large scale as we need clean water every day for everyday life across the globe. Okay, I have talked now a lot about pulp portfolio, and I have talked about the market for pulp. What about the new biomaterials? With the new biomaterials, we have concentrated our portfolio to three areas.
All of these are strategically fitting, being wood-based, and they offer significant value creation into the future. The first one is the biochemicals. The biochemicals is already an established business with the crude tall oil and turpentine replacing fossil-based chemicals and fuel. Here we have also added the lignin business where we are offering nature's glue as that is what lignin does in a tree. It makes sure that the tree can grow higher than 20 cm. Without lignin, no plant would be higher than roughly 20 cm. It is the lignin that glues the fiber together. We are offering nature's glue, but also binders in binders for dyes, so color clothing of clothes, colors of clothes. Without binders in the dyes, all colors will be washed out, and we would not look as nice, as proper as we do. This is an established business, like I said.
It's already giving around EUR 80 million + revenue per year for Stora Enso and steadily growing into new applications. The middle portfolio on the chart is the fiber business, and that is new applications for the fiber. Here we have both Papira and Fibrease, which are biofoams that are replacing fossil-based cushioning or insulation with completely not only recyclable, but renewable material. You can even compost Papira at home, growing new trees or vegetables in your garden. I have heard that Santa Claus is coming a little bit early this year. Maybe when you leave, he will be there with a small Papira gift for you so you can get a feel and touch of the material itself. Here we are selling commercially already from the pilot.
We have letters of intent to fill the first commercial facility, and we are just right now discussing with partners to have a good partnership set up where we both can have the production, but also the offtake as part of the company or spinoff or joint venture, depending on the setup that we will decide upon. Moving from the fiber business, last but not least, maybe the coolest part of the company or our portfolio, Lignode and CarbonScape, offering renewable materials into the battery itself. Lignode and CarbonScape are replacing fossil-based or mined materials in anodes. This is an area where we are step by step and steadily moving forward. Right now, we have 500 kg or 0.5 ton of Lignode being trialed with our customers and into sodium ion applications.
On the picture here, you have the first sodium ion pack we made together with Altris, one of our partners within this space. Here we will continue to steadily expand this. We have moved the pilot from producing grams to producing tons. In a value chain partnering setup, we will make sure to be able to take steady speed to market while ensuring we have all the right competencies and share risk and reward. I had the third area that I was supposed to talk about. Do you remember? Maybe most interesting for you. That is our clear path for margin expansion. Shall I still cover that? I see some nodding faces. Let us go to that then. As I said in the beginning, we are around 10% now at the bottom of the cycle, proud of that.
We believe with own actions, we can take that higher. In Hans' presentation, three out of the six examples were examples from biomaterials and actions that we have in motion already delivering value to our bottom line. You heard Marcio talk about the plantations in Veracel with not only improving the plantation and silviculture in the plantation, but also making every tree a little bit better than the previous one. We right now have Montes del Plata in overhaul that we used to call annual overhaul. We are now first time into 18 months pit stop, and that is now implemented into foreseeable future, meaning that we can run more quantities between the overhauls, but we can also optimize the overhauls better because we have more time to plan between them.
That is also true now for Veracel coming in Q1, as well as for Enocel just out of their last 12 months pit stop. The next one is in 18 months. We also have sourcing actions, making sure we leverage the volumes of Stora Enso with buying power when it comes to chemicals and for our JVs with our joint venture partners. For our new businesses, we believe the partnering is a very good way to share costs of continued development that will be needed at the same time as expanding the margins for the revenues. To summarize, we are uniquely positioned to serve demanding customers with specialized pulp and new biomaterials. We have the fantastic eucalyptus, sustainable, underpinning packaging performance, as well as offering significant cash flow for the company. Last but not least, we have a very clear path of own actions to improve our margins.
As you heard me say, they are already in motion. Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to your questions and welcome Jutta on stage.
Thank you so much, Johanna. I ask also Carolyn and Andreas to join us to the stage as well. We are open for the Q&A session, and you guys know the drill by now. Raise your hand and the microphone will come to you.
Thank you, it is Lars Kje llberg at Stifel again. Andreas, you spoke to a couple of things when it comes to BM6 and the cost curve. Hans already spoke to agility. I guess in terms of that agility, given that you're so low cost on BM6 relative to some of those third and fourth quartile, would you have an agility to shift production away from those given the excess supply that we currently have to reduce the overall cost base and really ramp up BM6 quicker?
The second point, an agility when it comes to sort of the long-term contracts that you have, it's obviously proven to be a bit of a headache considering the wood cost increases and the inability then to move pricing quick enough to compensate for that much higher cost. If you can give us some thought on that. The final question is just to understand exactly when you spoke to at Force, these sort of six, seven million benefit from buying eucalyptus now, where does that actually come from? What is delivering that cost benefit for that particular site?
Good. I'll start with the last one. When we were using other sources of pulp, birch pulp and other pulps, Eucalyptus is more affordable than those other pulp grades. Just by managing to keep the same specs of our packages with the Eucalyptus pulp instead of the other grades, you get from that price difference that you get from our Eucalyptus pulp. We managed to keep the specs, don't change our product, don't change our offering to the customers, but work with the recipes by replacing other pulp grades. That is where it comes from. You asked about our contracts. I think, yes, in the past, we have had some headaches, as you referred to. We have also learned from them.
To address that specific topic, in most of our contracts, which are multi-year contracts, we have clauses when there is a cost disruption that allow us to open a contract to renegotiate it. What we have also experienced in the recent past, even in the few cases when this was not in, is that the customers were understanding of the situation and there was a possibility for some upcharge. We have now, in most of our contracts, if not all of them by now, which are over a year, inserted certain clauses that if there is a certain percentage disruption on costs, both sides agree to renegotiate. That minimizes the risk that we have faced in the past.
When it comes to the cost position in Oulu, yes, it's the market leader, and yes, it will allow us to grow our market share as we have already been doing if you look at our relative performance and the market statistics. We have seen some of the high-cost machines of other players already being shut down in Finland, for example. I think that is something that is a possibility that this will continue to happen. What we are doing is we're focusing on what we can control, and we go for the market share. We go for those bigger volumes. Oulu allows us to be cost competitive on those bigger volumes.
Let's take Force, for example. Force has this incredible ability of serving especially smaller reels, those niche products, and that you cannot replicate in a big machine. You just lose too much efficiency. It has its value there in the portfolio as well. There is so much more capacity at higher cost than our smallest machine in Force.
Thanks.
It's Linus Larsson with SEB, and it's a question to all of you. It's pretty clear to me that you're very passionate about what you're doing. I wonder what makes you tick when it comes to your private economy, which are your KPIs and how are you incentivized and how is that aligned with the group targets that we previously talked about? As part of that, how are your KPIs aligned with capacity rationalization? Are your KPIs preventing you from potential capacity rationalization, or is there an alignment on that? I don't know who wants to talk and respond, but it's basically a question to all of you, I guess.
Thank you, Linus. If I start, and let's put it pretty simple, we have short-term targets with long-term targets. Long-term targets are aiming for us to make sure to increase shareholder value over time. Short-term targets are geared towards delivering the short-term financial commitments. Our short-term financial targets or short-term targets, they are around safety because, of course, nothing can be more important to make sure that you can come home from work all safe and sound. After that, it's profitability and it's operating working capital. All the rest is falling out of that. Would we run uncompetitive assets? No, because that would eat EBIT. Would we build stock instead of making sure we could sell as much as possible? No, because that will increase working capital, just to put it simply.
I think the board has done excellently in cooking this down to long-term measures supporting shareholder value long-term, but at the same time, short-term measures being very crisp and clear and geared to what's needed within the coming quarters and years.
If I just maybe build on that, there are also shared targets coming back to your capacity asset optimization. Like me and Markku over there on the response of food service and liquor, we share some assets. That also means we have shared targets. I have all the incentive to maximize value regardless of where. As I said during the presentation, I'm data-driven. I have no particularly, I'm not in love with any of my machines. I just want to generate as much value as I can. That will be done by optimizing their product allocation to the lowest cost assets wherever they are.
Hi there, it's Charlie Muir-Sands from BNP Paribas Exane. I just had a question. Firstly, a follow-up. You mentioned a clause to kind of revisit pricing where you see cost movements. I mean, it looks like wood costs are maybe starting to come back down now. Does that cut both ways? Do customers have the right to kind of come back and say, "Well, hang on, your wood costs are coming down, so can we have a lower price on our consumable, please?"
Secondly, there was a comment earlier about flexibility of the machines. I understand the new Oulu machine six can obviously produce a couple of different grades, but can you talk a bit more about the flexibility you have within the rest of the asset base and what you've got now and maybe what you can add to that flexibility in the base over the next couple of years? Thank you.
If I would start more broader, and then you can fill in maybe. In a performance culture like Hans talked about, the four A's, it's not that you work very hard when the market is tough, and then you sit lean back when the market is good. We are working, we are in a continuous improvement culture. If I take Montes del Plata, we are now on our eighth year of the journey of improving cash cost.
Regardless whether the market goes up or the market goes down, we continue to strive for higher efficiency, better yield, as well as higher quality. That is kind of the fundamental in this because we cannot steer the market. We should not steer the market even, right? We have to work on the things we can control. One of them is, for example, cash cost. All the business areas have similar efficiency KPIs that are in the spot, simply. Maybe you want to add something from specifically.
Back to the contract question first, it is not like the couple of percentage points, two, three, four percentage points that triggers these clauses. There needs to be a major shift in the cost structure, like the war that happened three years ago. That created a big disruption. Those are the kind of events that this contract, this clause aims at. Of course, it goes both ways. It would not be fair with our customers that we only look to what is important for us. I think it needs to be a fair win-win situation, and that is what is reflected.
Again, it needs to be a major disruption. The smaller uphikes, downhikes, those we will have to manage ourselves. On the interchangeability, we have two main or three main grades, if you will, in BM6 in Oulu, CKB, which we also produce in Skoghall. That is exactly the same recipes. We have also Performa Nova, our GC2, and Performa Lumi, our GC1. Those have been based on the recipes from Force.
In the other assets, the other mills, do they also have flexibility for the future?
We are working and we continuously work with our development. There is now some interchangeability also among other assets, for example, Imatra and Force, just as an example.
Hi, Andy Jones from UBS again. I just wanted to talk about future capital investments. I mean, clearly you're talking about getting the debt down and reducing the CapEx in the nearer term. I'm wondering under what circumstances you'd be talking about going ahead with, say, the Langebrugge conversion. That's obviously something you've talked about being an attractive project in the long term. Under what circumstances would you commit to that? Also, on the Lignode side, I mean, that was obviously talked about more actively, I think, a few years ago. What sort of capital requirements would that business need to scale that? Could you maybe give us some idea about the sort of longer-term market opportunity in that business? Again, what circumstances would be required to move that forward?
Should we start on the capital allocation or capital needs?
Yeah.
I think Langerbrugge, of course, I mean, we have talked about it in the past, and I think it makes a lot of sense in a market where integration actually is the key to win in corrugated and container board. The market is oversupplied, as we have discussed today also. This is probably not the best moment to bring new capacity to the market. I am absolutely sure that the market consolidation will also continue as we have seen and as we have spoken. The market consolidation will continue in container board and also in corrugated.
I think this is then maybe a couple of years down the line, and then this investment makes total sense because we have a very, very good footprint in Western Europe right next door, basically. We could replicate the situation we discussed in Poland also then to Western Europe. This actually makes a lot of sense, not at this moment in time in the market, but going down the line two, three years, this will actually be a very, very meaningful future potential investment.
If you kind of boil that down, I think what will make us consider future investments? First of all, we are well invested. Even take fluff that I talked about. We have spent already EUR 100 million to modernize and make sure to have a fluff production that is top-notch. To invest more in fluff, it would be a need to have a very good business case. That, I think, is true for anything. It needs to be good shareholder value, and there needs to be customers out there that want to buy this and need this, right? That is true for, I think, any business looking forward. Shareholder value, custo mer commitment.
With those words, it is very good to conclude the Q&A session for this one. Please, let's continue the discussions during the lunch break. Before that, let's hand over still to Hans for concluding remarks. Thank you. Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much, team. Thank you to all. It is now time to conclude. There are three key takeaways I would like you to take with you from this Capital Markets Day. First of all, we are sharpening our focus. We are creating two leading champions in their fields to maximize business value, but also to maximize shareholder value. Number two, we are executing on our margin expansion, profit improvement actions with speed and determination, building on our performance culture throughout the whole company. Number three, we are generating cash. We are really focusing now on cash generation, disciplined capital allocation. We have a strong world-leading asset base. We can capitalize on the heavy investments on our leading assets, our leading product portfolio. Now it is really the time to harvest.
With this word, we thank you all for your active participation, and we end the webcast by now. Thank you and bye-bye.