Navigator increases tissue paper prices by 10% from May

Portugal’s The Navigator Company is to increase the price of tissue paper by 10% from next month.

The group has justified the price hike in all markets in which it operates on the “sharp increase in production costs” adding that the price of paper paste will be “the highest it has ever been in the sector”.
The uptick in prices covers toilet paper, serviettes, tissue, kitchen roll, and hand towels, among others, in order to offset higher production costs.
Production prices have been going up since August of 2023, with sharper increases in paper paste, the main cost factor in the production of tissue papers. The company’s clients have been informed.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the cost of toilet roll can be pinned on an unsuspected culprit: the housing market slump in the US and Canada.
The housing downturn has sparked a crisis in lumber, sending futures tumbling more than 60% in the last 12 months. As a result, sawmills are closing. In Canada, the world’s largest softwood lumber producer, roughly a third of sawmill capacity is now shuttered in British Columbia.
That’s causing ripples across the global paper supply chain, which depends on the byproducts generated at the plants. Now, the world is facing a squeeze for wood pulp — the raw material for products such as bathroom and kitchen tissues.
Also, a material shortage is also an after-effect of the pandemic. Some factories use recycled paper to make toilet rolls, and with a shortage of office waste over the COVID-19 pandemic, recycled tissue is also in short supply. Toilet paper manufacturers have had to increase their prices to cover this.
Whatever the reasons, and you can probably throw in energy and distribution costs, the international price index for paste has shot up 65% since August 2023, with an additional hike of 10% now with “the highest prices ever historically recorded in the sector”.