China’s Taison Group Starts First TM in at Jiujiang Mill

China’s Taison Group has fired up a new 60,000-mtpy tissue machine at a  new mill in Jiujiang city, Jiangxi province. The first sheet of paper rolled off the machine in late June.

Dubbed TM 7, the Voith-supplied unit has a trim width of 5.6 m and a design speed of 2,200 m/min.

Three identical tissue machines will come online one by one at the same facility within a few months. By the end of this year, the Jiujiang mill will boast 240,000 mtpy of tissue capacity, furnished with both bamboo pulp and wood pulp.

The four PMs are the first leg of the group’s tissue expansion scheme for the Jiujiang plant. It will eventually build a total of 480,000 mtpy of tissue capacity there, according to an environmental impact assessment document published by the local authorities in 2016.

The Taison Group has existing tissue capacity in Chishui city, Guizhou province, and in Chongqing municipality. The Chishui facility, run by subsidiary Guizhou Chitianhua Paper Industry, operates two 60,000-mtpy tissue PMs.

The Chongqing mill, run by its subsidiary Well Mind Paper, houses three tissue lines with a combined capacity of 54,000 mtpy.

Market contacts reported that the group plans to add 120,000 mtpy of tissue capacity to the Chongqing site and to build a new tissue mill in Suzhou city, Anhui province.

The Taison Group is one of several Chinese companies rapidly expanding in the tissue segment. The China National Household Paper Association (CNHPIA) reported that the country’s tissue capacity hit 12.15 million mtpy at the end of 2017, up 8 percent from the previous year. The overall operating rate was merely 76 percent, though, as in 2016, indicating continuing oversupply.

The CNHPIA estimates that the new tissue PMs scheduled to start up this year and in 2019 will have a combined capacity of around 3.81 million mtpy, which will intensify competition and keep average operating rates low.