UPM Completes Stracel Sale

http://www.paperage.com/2013news/05_06_2013upm_stracel_blue_paper.html

UPM has completed the sale of assets and part of the land of the UPM Stracel paper mill site to Blue Paper SAS, the joint venture company of VPK Packaging Group NV and Klingele Papierwerke.

Blue Paper SAS will convert the mill to produce recycled fibre-based fluting and test-liner. The production is expected to start after completing investments in autumn 2013.

The sale of Stracel was part of UPM's plan to adjust its magazine paper and newsprint paper capacity to match the needs of its global customer base originally announced in August 2011. UPM stopped the production of coated magazine paper on the mill on 4th January 2013.

West Linn Announces Coated Increase

http://www.wlinpco.com/welcome.aspx

West Linn Paper has announced an increase in the price of Sonoma, Capistrano, Nature Web, and Nature Plus coated freesheet paper, effective with all orders shipped on or after July 1. The increase of $1.50/cwt applies to all basis weights and finishes.

Consolidation Continues at IP

http://www.internationalpaper.com/US/EN/index.html

In addition to previous reports of two box plant shutdowns, International Paper this week said it will close three corrugated container plants and a sheet plant in the US by mid-year.

The company will close box plants in Indianapolis, Lake Wales, FL, and Kansas City, KS, and a sheet plant in Jacksonville, FL.
Related to the Indianapolis closure by early July, IP cited overcapacity in its corrugated packaging system in some areas following the February 2012 combination with Temple-Inland.

NGP Capital Invests in Nekoosa Coated

NGP Capital Resources Invests $17.5M in Nekoosa Coated Products: NGP Capital Resources Company—today announced the closing of its third non-energy middle market portfolio investment. On April 22, 2013, the company closed a $17.5 million Second Lien Term Loan to fund a portion of the acquisition of IGI Corp. ("IGI") by Nekoosa Coated Products ("Nekoosa"), a portfolio company of Wingate Partners, a Dallas-based private equity group. The Second Lien Term Loan earns interest payable in cash at an annual rate of 13 percent plus paid-in-kind interest of 2 percent per annum and matures in October 2018.

Catalogers Fight For Fairness

Will Catalogers Wage a Fight For Fairness?5

Time for catalogers to stand up, says association head.

Big brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart and Target have locations in every state and already pay taxes there, so they will cheer on the anticipated passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act by the United States Senate next week. Specialty catalog sellers and e-commerce sites, many of them small operations, feel that the administrative burden of paying state taxes could threaten their survival. While the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association have been lobbying the issue for years on behalf of the big chains, catalogers have been unduly quiet on the issue. That changes next week with an emergency “fly-in” to get their message before key members of the House of Representatives who can derail the bill.
“The other side has been putting tens of millions of dollars behind the effort to pass this bill for years. But, to be perfectly frank, most catalog companies have just ignored this,” says Hamilton Davison, president and executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association. “The tax provisions in this bill are not doable for SMBs. We in the catalog industry are going to ignore this at our own peril.”
Davison and his board took the occasion of the group's National Catalog Forum kicking off in Washington next Wednesday to recruit members to fly in a day early and express their displeasure over the bill to members of the House Judiciary and Oversight & Government Reform committees. While the bill contains provisions that state governments must simplify their tax codes for out-of-state collection, the ACMA's position is that the bill as written would tip the scales in the favor of the big retailers.

Hearst Hits Million Tablet Subscribers

http://allthingsd.com/20130503/hearst-gets-its-million-digital-subscribers/?utm_source=feedly

Hearst Magazines head David Carey said his company would have a million people subscribing to its tablet editions by the end of 2012.

That didn’t happen, and they ended December with something like 900,000 subscribers. But now it has: Carey said Hearst hit the one million mark at the end of March.

Q1 Commercial Printing Shipments Fall

Q1 2013 US Commercial Printing Shipments Nearly Flat with 2012; March Shipments Down (Dr. Joe):
US commercial printing shipments for the first quarter were down -$42 million compared to 2012 (-0.22%), at $19.3 billion. Q1 shipments may have been distorted by a strong January, likely caused by delayed buying by small businesses as they delayed purchases in tax planning efforts in December 2012.

March 2013 shipments were $6.771 billion, down -$163 million, or -2.4% compared to 2012 (-3.8% after inflation). Both February and March had similar comparisons, raising concerns of a negative pattern emerging for the rest of the year.

Question for Printers

http://whattheythink.com/articles/63452-why-printers-must-ask-themselves-my-business-irreplaceable/

Paul Reilly spends a lot of time thinking, speaking, and consulting about what he calls “megatrends”: shifts in reality that have overturned many long-standing assumptions about what it takes to survive and thrive as a printing business. The chart on this page displays the matrix of talking points that he uses to make these megatrends clear in presentations to clients and industry groups. 
In one way or another, they all relate to the need for competitive differentiation—the advantage enjoyed by printing companies whose customers have come to think of them as irreplaceable. Years ago, says Reilly, a printer might be able to claim an edge if “you had great people who knew how to make the dots dance.” Nowadays, when commonly used digital technologies let every printer be a Balanchine, customers are used to getting Swan Lake in every job no matter whom they are buying their printing from.

USPS Wins Green Challenge Award

http://gantdaily.com/2013/05/03/u-s-postal-service-wins-10-federal-green-challenge-awards/

The U.S. Postal Service was recently honored with 10 awards in the Federal Green Challenge competition — a national effort under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Sustainable Materials Management Program — for its waste reduction efforts across the United States.