Premier Paper continues to grapple with the decline of demand for paper by increasing sales of what it calls value added products.
The beneficial aspects of this is not yet apparent in the company’s results. For 2025 Premier Paper Holdings, the ultimate UK trading entity, reported a decline in turnover and a pretax loss. Turnover dropped from £284.6 million to £263.1 million with a loss of £2.4 million at the pretax level compared with a £3.8 million pretax profit in 2024. Premier Paper Group fared worse in terms of pretax profit where a £6.1 million profit in 2024 became a £11.9 million loss the following year.
The business has reduced the headcount and focused on the control of costs to turn the situation round. It blames a 6% dilution in average selling price for the loss. The strategy is to expand the range of value add products to mitigate the rate of decline in commodity volumes.
To this end the merchant has been active in mergers and acquisitions. In 2025 it added Sarcina Packaging to the Wine Box Company. This policy has continued in 2026 with the purchase of PPB to expand the display products portfolio in February, followed by Transpack in April along with the change in status of the Wine Box Company from an indirect subsidiary to a branch of the Premier Paper Group in May.
That month Premier Paper Holdings received £43 million from owner Japan Pulp & Paper in order to “provide headroom for future growth”.
The environment continues to play a growing role as Premier seeks an Eco Vadis rating. It has completed installation of solar panels on the roofs of its Dartford and Castle Donington sites notes that more of its 3,000 plus UK customers are embracing the company’s Carbon Capture programme. Since this began, Premier has planted 560,000 trees with the Woodland Trust, contributing £2.3 million from printers to the charity.
