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Fisher Investments realizes that Paper & Forest Products are a very small portion of the Materials sector in most benchmarks, so we'll cover it only briefly. The products in this industry are priced regionally and producers should be evaluated on a regional basis.
Because of its use in periodicals, consumer goods, shipping, and general office activity, paper and paperboard demand is economically sensitive. Although some forecasted a significant decline in paper consumption during the 1990s technology revolution, consumption has not drastically declined (outside of newsprint). In fact, Fisher Investments has found that global consumption of paper and paperboard increased 40 percent from 1993 to 2004.* The largest end markets are printing and writing paper, containerboard, and boxboard — in 2000, they combined to form 80 percent of US consumption.** Unlike much of this sector, where emerging markets play such a central role in supply and demand, the developed world is the primary consumer and producer of paper products. Based on wood pulp consumption, North America, Western Europe, and Japan combined to produce nearly 70 percent of the world's paper in 2007.*
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