I read many reports from analysts which seem to imply that market conditions often reflect uptime.

Other than extreme conditions, such as we have seen in newsprint and printing & writing grades (declining markets), I have almost never seen this to be the case.

Granted, sometimes annual outages will be moved a month or two, based on market conditions.  However, week in and week out, I am not aware of any mills that adjust operating hours based on markets.

It is just not the nature of a continuous operation such as papermaking to take minor amounts of downtime here and there.  It takes hours to start up a paper machine and hours to shut it down.  Then there are the operating crews, whose lives are dictated by a rotating schedule.

Generally, paper mills run flat out, trying as hard as they can every day to make as many tons as they can.  It is not like converting or printing operations, usually five day a week operations, which have weekends to use to make up poor performance during the week.

So, please, take a look at what you are saying about uptime and market conditions.  Most of the time they are not in any way related to each other.

If you have any private comments you want to share with me, send me an email in confidence at jthompson@taii.com.