With the further increase in the demand for imported waste paper in the domestic market, this year's waste paper price is expected to increase by at least 8%. According to the “Beijing Modern Business Daily†report, due to the low price of imported waste paper, its fiber is mostly wood fiber, and the quality can be guaranteed. This is a low-cost imported waste paper for countries like China that lack a raw material for papermaking fiber. Become an important raw material for China's paper industry. However, the recent increase in the price of imported waste paper has weakened the competitive advantage of China's products based on waste pulp.
According to statistics from the China National Light Industry Information Center, China imported 6.8726 million tons of waste paper last year, with an import value of 732 million US dollars. The volume of imports increased by 7.06% and 11.18% respectively year-on-year. In China's current papermaking raw material structure, the proportion of waste paper is 44%, and the proportion of wood pulp fiber raw material is 23.1%, while in other countries, the proportion of waste paper as raw material is 34%, which reflects the paper industry in China for waste paper. Resources have great dependencies.
Guo Yongxin of China Light Industry Information Center believes that imported waste paper has an important supporting role for the development of the domestic paper industry. In recent years, the number of imported pulp and waste papers in China has grown rapidly, far higher than the increase in the total output of male paper and paperboard. The ratio between the total volume of imported waste paper and paper production increased from 5.9% in 1997 to 20.1% in 2001, with an annual growth rate of 35.9%. This excessive dependence on imported waste paper resources will lead to crisis in the future development of the company. Relatively speaking, imported waste paper quality and cheap, many domestic companies rely on imported raw materials for the production of raw materials, demand increased year after year. As far as the world is concerned, the recovery of waste paper is correspondingly limited, and rising demand will inevitably lead to continued price increases. It is expected that the price of imported waste paper will increase by at least 8% this year.
China's forest resources are limited, and waste paper resources can be used as an alternative to wood pulp. However, since 2001, the price of imported wood pulp has dropped rapidly, and the price gap between imported and waste paper has sharply narrowed. By the first half of last year, the spread between the two has been reduced by US$296/tonne. Nevertheless, from the current development trend, the demand for imported waste paper in China will continue to increase. Relevant statistics show that the ratio of waste paper use in China to global waste paper usage has increased from 5.92% in 1994 to 8.97% in 2001, with 11.43% in 1999. In 2001, the total amount of waste paper imports from all countries in the world was 33.63 million tons, and the proportion of imports from China increased to 19%.
At present, domestic household paper accounts for 20% of all paper products, and the remaining 80% are all industrial paper and writing paper. Since domestic paper requires the use of disposable fibers as raw materials, the greatest impact on the increase in the import price of waste paper will be the production of various types of industrial paper.
Guo Yongxin stated that many of the important raw materials for domestic paper products are imported waste paper. Some news paper production materials are even 100% imported waste paper. At the same time, the middle sandwich of most packing board boards is also waste paper. In newsprint, except that coated paper is made from 100% chemical fiber, most of the other cultural papers use waste paper as raw material. Therefore, the rising price of imported waste paper will have the greatest impact on domestic packaging paper and some cultural papers, which will increase production costs and lose market competitiveness. Once the production cost of domestic enterprises rises, foreign high-grade paper products will surely squeeze out China's mid-range paper. Market share.
The industry believes that to reduce excessive dependence on imported waste paper, the most fundamental measure is to increase the domestic wood pulp supply rate. At present, China is starting a forestry-paper integration project and plans to increase the domestic supply rate of wood pulp from the current 7% to 15% in 2010. At the same time, with the continuous development of society, consumers are increasingly pursuing the grade of paper products, and high-end new products have become the profits of the industry. Therefore, enterprises should consider wood pulp as the main raw material to produce high-end products, instead of using waste paper as the main raw material to produce medium and low-grade products, thereby increasing the proportion of wood pulp in China's papermaking raw materials.