C&S Paper Building New Tissue Machines in Hubei, China

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C&S Paper is building three new 30,000-metric tpy tissue machines at a new mill in Xiaogan city, in China’s central province of Hubei.

Supplied by the PMP Group, each unit has a trim width of 3.5 m and a design speed of 1,600 m/min.

The first is scheduled to be fired up next month. The other two are expected to come online one after another by the end of this year.

Together they are the first leg of C&S Paper’s ongoing expansion in Xiaogan. The Shenzhen-listed company runs another facility in the city.

It operates two small tissue machines there, commissioned in 2005 and 2009 respectively, with a combined capacity of 22,500 metric tpy.

It first announced its expansion scheme in Xiaogan late 2016, planning to add 200,000 metric tpy of tissue paper capacity in the city. The scale of the project was boosted to 300,000 metric tpy in its environmental impact assessment (EIA) report in September 2017.

The project will be carried out in three phases, but the EIA document did not disclose a timeline on them.

The trio of new tissue PMs include two units which were initially destined for the company’s Tangshan mill in the northern province of Hebei.

C&S started up a similar 30,000-metric tpy PMP Group-supplied tissue machine at its Tangshan plant in November 2017. It was supposed to be followed by two identical PMs, completing a tissue expansion plan that had been unveiled for the Tangshan mill in 2016.

However, the two were redirected to the new site in Xiaogan to feed stronger tissue demand in the central area of the country.

The tissue sector in China remains oversupplied in general. The country’s tissue capacity reached 13.1 million metric tpy at the end of 2018, up 7.8 percent from the previous year, according to the latest statistics from the China National Household Paper Industry Association (CNHPIA).

The overall operating rate went from 76 percent in 2017 to 73 percent in 2018, indicating increasing oversupply.

The CNHPIA estimates that the new tissue PMs scheduled to start up by the end of 2020 will have a total capacity of around 3.3 million metric tpy.

Some of the new projects may be delayed due to the intensifying competition, but overall operating rates are expected to stay low.

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