TWM’s Country and Operational Reports produce a mass of evidence on the UK’s tissue past, present and future, and confirms that a fundamental transformation is underway.
From 2007 to 2021 domestic tissue production capacity decreased by about 18%, a startling figure given the levels of capacity increases achieved in other markets, both mature and developing, across the global industry.
Stagnation and machine shutdowns were the overriding feature. Among trading partners the UK had, and to a lesser extent still has, the oldest tissue machine fleet and highest production costs.
The business impetus is being powered not from the west, by the American tissue giants of yesteryear, but from continental Europe. Leading companies such as Sweden’s Essity, Italy’s Sofidel and Portugal’s the Navigator Group have taken ownership. Another is Germany’s WEPA Group, now present in Blackburn, Lancashire, and Bridgend, Wales. Tim Vormweg, WEPA Director Group Communications, can stand as a summary of the new era: “The UK market is a growth market that offers many opportunities.”
Quote of the Edition:
UK-headquartered Poppies Europe Director Armindo Marques explains his company’s growth strategy after doubling manufacturing space: “A generous dose of competitiveness to grab some market share, a handful of product development to enlarge our offer, and a pinch of acquisitions to rationalise the lot.”
What more can Artificial Intelligence do for the tissue industry?
AI – or to give it its more superficially understandable description of ‘large language model’ – gets a necessarily short shout-out in MarketIssues.
Leading European analysts AFRY traces its evolution from the 1950s, through digitalisation to the 5th and 6th Industrial Revolutions using quantum computing and nanotechnology. Only in terms of the Seventh Industrial Revolution do we get the future tense, when we might witness AI converging with BioIntelligence and synthetic biology.
To answer the question in the headline, AI adds more power and speed to the organisational nitty gritty of running the business, helping refined choices to be made across progressively more complex source-to-shelf management.
While there will be many category advances decades hence, there are other elements to that “might.” One is – will ROI be worth it? Will projected trillions of investment – Google’s former chief executive Eric Schmidt described the figures as “mind-boggling” – deliver for the bottom line in the real world outside of the brilliance of the technology? The investors will decide.
