Forestweb North American Packaging Index flat in December against announced price hikes

Dec 28, 2009 — Forestweb

LOS ANGELES, December 28, 2009 (Forestweb) — The Forestweb North American Packaging Index remained unchanged again in December as the market waits to learn the outcome of announced containerboard prices hikes in January.

The index ended 2009 at 106.43, a decline of 16.66% for the year after three downward adjustments to market prices. Containerboard prices have weakened slowly in the past six months of the year. Despite improving U.S. manufacturing, producers and buyers alike are maintaining low, just-in-time inventory levels.

In addition, the index failed to reflect any more of the announced price increase of US$40 per ton for coated and uncoated recycled boxboard grades beyond a $10-15/ton boost last fall. That may be changed just ahead as coated recycled boxboard prices did add incrementally in November and December.

The leading solid bleached paperboard producers have announced $40/ton price increases for January – the first since an unsuccessful move last summer coinciding with widespread downtime. The machine downtime did help balance orders with inventory, but the industry still awaits a true pickup in packaging demand.

Forestweb’s price indices are Laspeyres indices that represent a statistical measure of a weighted average of printing and writing paper, pulp and paperboard prices and which summarize the relative changes in price levels over time using an arbitrarily chosen base period. All Forestweb indices use the base year 2000 except for pulp, which uses 2001 as the base year.

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