Europulp is the Federation of the National Associations of Pulp Agents in Western Europe and as such it represents most of the pulp agents in the biggest market pulp area in the world with members in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, the UK and Turkey.
Conservatively Europulp’s members cover more than 75% of the European Market or just under 40% of the world’s market pulp business. It represents Independent Agents and Local Sales Offices of the major pulp and paper companies with outlets in Europe. Europulp meets the needs of both types of agent and of their principals.
The main goals of Europulp are:
- Trade generally faces ever increasingly demanding edicts from the Commission in Brussels as to how business is carried out. Europulp aims to help individual member associations digest and then meet these demands and at the same time try to homogenise the conditions of representation.
- Europulp has a programme to harmonise nomenclature of the various grades sold in the pulp market. It realises that this will not be easy as everybody’s ‘own’ system is most obviously the ‘right’ one, but it is going to try. It will be consulting widely, not only the individual members but, through them, their principals as well.
- Europulp acts as a forum for discussion of and response to common problems that arrive from time to time. It is no secret that twenty years ago the pulp and paper industry as a whole tried to hide behind the parapet and hope that difficult questions thrown its way would go away. It is not Europulp’s intention to step on the toes of the various national and international producer organisations but, on the contrary, it wants to help them formulate an adequate response to those market demands peculiar to the European market.
- In our early days it became clear, to us at least, that there was a big gap in our knowledge as to where all those pulp quantities published monthly in the Norscan figures were actually situated. Since its inception Europulp has built up a procedure for the collection of monthly port stock figures right across Europe. These are published very soon after each month and allowing suppliers and customers alike to know what is, or is not, readily available. For the moment these figures give total port stocks for each country. At some future stage Europulp would like to separate these into sold and unsold tonnes and if possible into softwood and hardwood categories.