In early November, the Union of Printing Industry Enterprises (GIPP) appealed to the Ministry of Industry and Trade with a complaint about the rise in prices for printing houses for several types of paper at once – newsprint, offset, coated and others. The government heard the voice of the profile association: the department held a joint meeting with paper manufacturers and the Federal Antimonopoly Service.
It was decided to form a working group under the Ministry of Industry and Trade to collect data on prices from paper manufacturers, the printing industry and the publishing business to resolve the issue. Experts told MK whether this approach will solve the problem of rising prices for paper.
Over the past year, the selling price of pulp has grown by 30%, offset and printing paper has risen in price by 6-15%, wrapping paper – by 46%, and the most popular corrugated board has soared in price by 65%, according to Rosstat data. As a result, paper mills are switching to a more profitable production of cardboard, mostly for the foreign market, where prices are higher due to the difference in exchange rates, and the demand from online stores for packaging remains high even in the face of reduced pandemic restrictions.
In this regard, the GIPP sent a letter to the Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov, in which he announced an “unprecedented rise in prices” for paper in 2021. The ministry heard the voice of the industry specialists and created a working group to resolve the issue of price regulation. However, how successful her work will be is an open question, because not all departments are aware of the severity of the possible crisis and its social consequences.
So, for example, the Ministry of Digital Industry calls to see in the change in the market situation not a threat, but an opportunity for the development of the industry and its partners – printers, distributors, advertisers. Say, there is a reason to move from “outdated” paper media to modern, “gadget” ones. True, the question remains unanswered: is the digital department ready to provide all pensioners of Russia with personal computers or smartphones and teach them to use them? And will it really be so useful for the educational process to abandon paper textbooks and teaching materials, and will every rural school in our country be able to get “digital analogs”?
If nothing is done in the current situation, the famous “invisible hand of the market” can deprive Russians of newspapers, magazines, educational and methodological aids.
“The unprecedented rise in prices on the paper market that began in the spring of 2021 will have an extremely negative impact on the prospects for the industry to return to pre-pandemic indicators,” Olga Verkhnyatskaya, Director General of Moscow Newspaper Printing House, continues the conversation. “So, in the spring-summer of 2021, publishers using offset paper often faced the inability to release their products on schedule and the required volumes of their products simply due to the lack of such paper from suppliers.” The reason for this was the unprecedented shortage of domestic offset paper on the market.
Over the past 6 months, the average increase in the cost of offset paper of all Russian mills, regardless of its quality and whiteness, amounted to about 30%. In late spring, the situation worsened even more due to the closure of the Arkhangelsk Paper Mill, which produced offset and writing paper, and the reduction in offset paper production by other enterprises when they were reoriented to cardboard production, the expert notes.
Domestic paper producers do not meet publishers halfway, and surplus products are sold abroad. According to a number of sources, the Solikamsk paper mill produces newsprint for the Russian market 2-3 days a month, the rest of the time this Russian production supplies the markets of China and India. A similar situation is in Kondopoga and Balakhna. The only Russian manufacturer of rolled light-coated paper, the Kama pulp and paper mill (PPM), in June immediately increased prices for its entire line of popular coated papers by more than 30%.
According to the disappointing forecasts of experts, at such a rate of growth, prices for coated paper can grow by almost 100% per year, for offset and cardboard – by more than 50%, for newspaper – from 30% to 40%. “It is obvious that many publishing houses and printing houses simply cannot survive this insane price increase, since it is simply impossible to broadcast such price increases to end consumers of printed products in the difficult economic situation in the country,” warns Olga Verkhnyatskaya. It is not only the national media that are now under attack. The academic environment suffers, because digital technologies are not always capable of replacing a book in a particular educational process, she emphasizes.
In a difficult situation, the state could maintain an effective dialogue between the industry and the paper industry, give it preferences, tax deductions and orders. This would have seriously smoothed the rise in paper prices and would have reassured market participants. “The state can become a shareholder in a number of industry enterprises pursuing its own broad interests,” believes Andrey Loboda, top manager in the field of financial communications and CSR. – The state has allocated 2.85 billion for socially significant online media projects for three years. For print media, such support for a year and a half could amount to about 3 billion rubles. “
It is possible to influence the market forces by regulating producer prices and other government measures. For example, Olga Verkhnyatskaya proposes to introduce protective duties on the export of various types of paper, including newspaper, coated, offset, and cardboard. papers.
In any case, in the history of the shortage of paper, you should not rely on the “invisible hand of the market”. This “hand” is clearly not raking in the direction of Russia, but in the direction of China and India. But Russian consumers have their own interests, and they need to be defended. Therefore, the state authorities must say their weighty word and act more decisively at the legislative level, otherwise readers will be left without newspapers and magazines, publishing houses – without books, and the education system – without textbooks and methodological literature.
