On January 18, 2019, Chinese authorities released 60,420 metric tons of new quota for recovered paper imports, adding to a total of 5.47 million metric tons quota for year 2019 so far.
The surprisingly small volume of the 3rd lot was catered to 4 paper and board producers located in Southern China’s Guangdong Province and 1 in upper Western Shanxi Province – all relatively small by capacity. And these benefiters may only be able to source recovered paper in the neighboring markets such as Japan and Taiwan.
More market analysts expected, however, that authorities in China would likely approve and grant more import quota in the first half of 2019 than the same period of last year as part of the efforts to activate the country’s economy where paper and board are needed in both domestic and export sales.