BEIJING, 5 July 2022 (Fastmarkets RISI) - Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) has begun trial production on a new 600,000-tonne/yr containerboard machine at a greenfield mill in Jingzhou city, China’s central province of Hubei.

The first sheet of board rolled off the line last week.

Dubbed PM 45, the 8.5-m-wide machine is currently producing 100% recycled fiber-based high-strength corrugating medium and testliner.

The unit is the first production line to have been fired up at the Jingzhou site, which is the Nine Dragons’ ninth board mill in China.

According to the capacity expansion roadmap the company laid out in February, the Jingzhou mill will see the startup of another 600,000-tonne/yr recycled containerboard machine in the third quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, 600,000 tonnes/yr of chemical pulp capacity is set to kick off production there.

Together, they are part of the packaging giant’s massive plan to add a total 11.07 million tonnes/yr of pulp, paper and board capacity in China and Malaysia by the second quarter of 2024.

Further expansions in Hubei: The mill in Jingzhou is Nine Dragons’ first board production base in the central part of China.

In late 2020, the company obtained environmental approvals to build 600,000 tonnes/yr of pulp capacity and 2.4 million tonnes/yr of containerboard capacity at the greenfield site in Jianli, Jingzhou city, Hubei province.

The RMB 13.5 billion ($2 billion) plan was one of the many vast investment schemes that the province attracted in the second half of 2020 to help itself recover from the economic blow of the first Covid-19 outbreak, which started at its capital Wuhan at the beginning of that year and soon spread to other major cities in the province.

In 2021, Nine Dragons bumped up the scale of its investment plan for the Jingzhou site, seeking to add an additional 1.1 million tonnes/yr of pulp capacity and 2 million tonnes/yr of packaging board capacity there, though without detailing a timeline.

From Fastmarkets RISI