Upm has decided to cut 305 thousand tonnes in the production of graphic paper in Europe. The company will definitively close the paper machine no. 3 in the Austrian plant of Steyrermühl and the paper machine no. 2 in Augsburg, Germany. This decision is based on the plan announced in November 2016.
Consultations with employees have been conducted in compliance with local norms and have now ended: Augsburg will have 143 redundancies, will Steyrermühl will register 125. The paper machine no. 3 in Steyrermühl will be definitively brought to a standstill at the end of the first quarter of 2017, while production on the paper machine no. SC 2 in Augsburg has already been stopped at the end of 2016. Both production sites will continue producing paper at competitive costs with their remaining machines.
«We perfectly understand the disappointment of our employees at the Steyrermühl and Augsburg plants», states Anu Ahola, who is Senior Vice President of the News & Retail Division at Upm Paper ENA. «Due to negative market conditions, however, we are forced to adapt our activities to meet demand and guarantee a competitive scenario to all our remaining assets related to paper production. We and our labour force carried out constructive consultations based on mutual trust in order to reduce the impact of personnel costs to the minimum». The closure of both machines would bring about annual savings of about 30 million Euros.