Partner View: Suzano

What role does Spinnova play in its strategic partner Suzano’s own strategy? What kind of a near future do Suzano see for the duo?

If you missed Spinnova’s H1 webcast with a visit from Suzano Europe’s Strategic Projects Director Ari Borg, here’s a transcript of his discussion with Spinnova’s CEO and co-founder Janne Poranen.

If you want to watch a recording of the webcast, this discussion starts from about 22 minutes into the recording.

Ari Borg, can you outline Suzano’s strategy?

Sure, but before talking about the strategy I would like to mention that we at Suzano are guided by our purpose which is “Renewing life inspired by trees”. Suzano is a company based on renewable tree plantations. We see this giving us a great opportunity to contribute to the long-term development goals of society, because we have big issues such as global warming, loss of biodiversity and income inequality. We need to be able to support this development in a positive and sustainable way.

Our strategy is to be the agent that transforms the society and expand to new markets, where we can replace fossil-based and other materials which have a bigger environmental footprint than wood. We intend to use our competitive position which comes from the competitive fibre cost and the sustainability to enter these markets. Textiles represent a very good opportunity for this. In short, we are focused on markets that are tied to paper or paper derivative products.

How do you see Spinnova as part of your strategy at the moment?

When we talk about our strategy, we talk a lot about “Innovability”; innovation and sustainability. Of course, you could expand to the textile market in many ways, but Spinnova is a perfect example of sustainability and innovation. That is a great opportunity for Suzano to grow, because we want to grow in businesses, where together with our partners can be natural leaders, and that are possible to scale up rapidly to commercial scale.

How do you see our near future together?

In the beginning of 2020, Suzano launched a number of very impressive sustainability targets based on the UN Sustainability Agenda 2030. One of those targets is to sell 10 million tonnes of products, which will replace fossil-based products.

This target is of course very ambitious, but surely, when we start the Woodspin factory at the end of 2022, we can optimize the technology and more importantly, when we really enter the market, that supports our 10 million tonne goal. Also, it’s a very important step to ramp up Woodspin to the scale ambition that we want it to reach.

We at Suzano really believe in Spinnova’s technology, and that’s a cornerstone of the Woodspin operation as well, because without the Spinnova technology, there would not be Woodspin. Also, what’s very important for us is that next to the Woodspin factory we’re building a micro fibrillated cellulose factory. This is Suzano’s first production investment outside of Brazil, so a real milestone for us.

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