The Biggest Paper Companies in the World: Producers, Capacity and Main Grades

Updated November 2026

The biggest paper companies by sales are Smurfit Westrock, at $31.18 billion for 2025, and International Paper, at $23.63 billion. By weight the order flips: Nine Dragons Paper sold 24.5 million tonnes in the year ending June 2026, more than either Western group publishes.

The pulp and paper industry worldwide has no official ranking, so those three facts, all from company filings, answer different questions. A buyer sizing a mill customer, a converter buying base paper, an investor appraising a market value list and a student wanting to know who produces the most paper need different tables, so this guide deals with sales, paper tonnage and market value separately. We manufacture paper machines, so these companies are the part of the industry we’re most interested in. All sales and tonnage figures refer to the respective companies’ fiscal years. Where companies report in short tons, we’ve converted those figures to metric tonnes in the ranking tables; US industry and grade figures stay in tons, as reported.

Who Is the Biggest Paper Company in the World?

Smurfit Westrock is the biggest paper company in the world by sales, with $31,179 million of net sales in 2025, 57 paper mills and operations in 40 countries. By weight, Nine Dragons Paper is the largest producer among the companies in this ranking that publish comparable tonnage. International Paper ranks second by sales and highest of the seven table companies on a November 2026 market value list, which omits Smurfit Westrock.

The company headquartered in Dublin was created in July 2024 when Smurfit Kappa and WestRock merged to form the largest paper and packaging group by sales. It’s a global leader in corrugated packaging with 179 production facilities in Europe alone, and the majority of its mill output serves the group’s converting operations. This fact clearly distinguishes it from a pure manufacturer of paper and explains most of the gaps in the table below.

What Are the Top 10 Paper Companies in the World?

Excluding hygiene-led groups, the top companies by latest annual sales are Smurfit Westrock, International Paper, Oji Holdings, UPM, Stora Enso, Nine Dragons Paper, Packaging Corporation of America, Suzano, Mondi and Graphic Packaging. The first two are significantly ahead of the other paper manufacturing companies, each of which reports sales of between approximately $8.6 billion and $12.4 billion. This list covers companies that publish results of filed financial statements and primarily sell paper, board, pulp, or fiber-based packaging, and therefore ranks the companies that can be compared, not every private producer. Stora Enso and Nine Dragons are effectively tied. Their dollar figures differ by about 0.1%, so a different exchange rate could reverse their ranking.

This is the 3-Metric Paper Scoreboard: sales, tonnes and market value side by side where figures are published, so you can see how far apart the three measures run. Dollar values use the IRS 2025 yearly average exchange rates. Oji and Nine Dragons close their years in March and June 2026, so their dollar figures are close approximations. Market values are one reading from a listed pulp and paper ranking taken in November 2026.

The table purposely omits Kimberly-Clark and Essity. Both are hygiene and personal care groups whose sales are focused on brands rather than paper, so they appear in the US and Europe sections below. Private groups such as Georgia-Pacific don’t release annual sales and, therefore, don’t feature on any filing-based lists, even though Georgia-Pacific says it is among the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of bath tissue and paper towels.

Why Rankings of Paper Companies Disagree

Rankings of paper companies vary because they measure sales, tonnes or market value, and each measure rewards a different business. Group sales count boxes and hygiene brands along the value chain, tonnes reward large base-paper mills, and market value reflects investor views on one trading day.

Smurfit Westrock, Packaging Corporation of America and Graphic Packaging don’t appear on that market value list at all, so three large producers drop out before the ranking starts. For a capital request or a market-size slide, quote sales or tonnes from a filing and state the year.

The Sales-per-Tonne Test

The Sales-per-Tonne Test shows where in the value chain a company sells by dividing group sales by tonnes. A low number indicates base paper. A high number indicates boxes or branded tissue. Group sales include non-paper business as well, so it indicates business mix rather than price or profitability.

Assumed inputs: filed 2025 or FY2026 sales converted at the IRS rates above, divided by each company’s stated tonnes. Smurfit Westrock uses production, and the others use sales volume or product tons; Essity’s report says tons without defining them, so we read those as metric. Take each result as an order of magnitude.

Smurfit Westrock’s own split supports the reading. Its 2025 annual report on Form 10-K shows $25,049 million from packaging and $6,130 million from paper, so packaging was 80.3% of revenue. Worked through, reading its tons as short tons: $31,179 million divided by 18.87 million tonnes gives $1,652, about 3.85 times the $429 at Nine Dragons.

Largest Paper Companies by Tonnage

Nine Dragons Paper is the largest paper company by tonnage among those that publish comparable figures, selling 24.5 million tonnes in the year to June 2026 against designed paper capacity of 24.8 million tonnes. It also has 5.4 million tonnes of wood pulp capacity, and paper capacity reaches about 26.1 million tonnes after current projects finish.

Smurfit Westrock publishes no single output total, but its 10-K lists each part: 9.3 million tons of containerboard and 3.2 million tons of paperboard in North America, 6.4 million tons of containerboard in Europe, 0.4 million tons of other paperboard, and 1.5 million tons in Latin America. Those sum to 20.8 million tons. Its stated capacity is about 23 million tons a year.

The filing doesn’t define its tons, so we read them as short tons. The company’s sustainability report states that 13.1 million tons of recovered fiber is roughly equivalent to 11.8 million metric tons, close to the 0.907 factor for short tons. Converted, Smurfit Westrock produced about 18.9 million tonnes and can potentially produce about 20.9 million tonnes, meaning Nine Dragons is ahead on both accounts.

International Paper’s figure is one that’s easily misquoted. Their 2025 annual report gives US capacity of about 11 million tons at the end of the year, down from about 13 million tons of US capacity in their 2024 capacity table following some mill closures, and gives no global total. So, their true group tonnage is greater than these US figures. It’s still one of the largest producers of containerboard in the US.

Where Is Paper Manufactured?

Paper is mostly produced in China, the US, India, Japan and Germany. FAO forest product statistics reported world production of paper and paperboard was 423 million tonnes in 2024, with China accounting for 33% and the US, 15%, indicating China produces more than twice as much as the US.

What Is the Largest Producer of Paper?

China is the largest producer of paper by country, and Nine Dragons is the largest by company among those in this ranking that publish comparable tonnage. Country-level and company-level production figures are often mixed on the same page, so a list of paper producing nations can appear first in a search about companies. No single company comes close to national totals: the 24.5 million tonnes Nine Dragons sells equals about 6% of world output.

India’s 5% share matches Japan’s and Germany’s, and paper companies in India form their own market, separate from this global list. If the term is new to you, this guide to what paper is covers its main types and how it is made.

Biggest Paper Companies in America

The largest US-based paper companies by sales are International Paper, Packaging Corporation of America and Graphic Packaging. Kimberly-Clark outsells Packaging Corporation of America and Graphic Packaging, but is focused on personal care. Georgia-Pacific is private. Together they cover the main US paper products, and the American pulp and paper trade body AF&PA puts national paper and paperboard production at 66.3 million tons in 2025.

International Paper

International Paper, based in Memphis, reported $23,634 million of net sales for 2025, of which $15,175 million came from North America and $8,451 million from EMEA. It sold Global Cellulose Fibers, its cellulose and pulp unit, for $1.5 billion in January 2026. The company is now planning to create two independent, publicly traded packaging solutions companies, with plans to complete the separation in 12-15 months after the announcement.

Georgia-Pacific

Georgia-Pacific LLC is based in Atlanta and privately owned by Koch, Inc. With its subsidiaries, it makes bath tissue, paper towels, and napkins; and paper-based packaging, with over 30,000 employees and 150 plus locations. It also makes cellulose and building products.

Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark reported $20,058 million of sales for 2024, including $3,335 million from the international family care business that has since moved into the Arbex joint venture. Its remaining group leans on personal care, so tissue is only part of the story.

Packaging Corporation of America and Graphic Packaging

Packaging Corporation of America posted $8,989.3 million in sales for 2025 and principally sells corrugated packaging; it also bought the containerboard business of Greif, an industrial packaging group. Graphic Packaging, a manufacturer of packaging for food service and consumer goods, posted $8,617 million and focuses on paperboard and folding cartons. Its new recycled paperboard mill in Waco, Texas, is expected to cost approximately $1.67 billion.

Largest Paper Companies in Europe

The largest paper companies in Europe are Smurfit Westrock, UPM, Stora Enso, Mondi and Essity. European production fell 1.6% to 77.4 million tonnes in 2025, according to Cepi. These corporations report forest products, energy, and materials businesses as well as paper, so the overall group sales overstate their paper business.

• UPM (Finland): €9,656 million of 2025 sales across pulp, energy, adhesive materials and specialty papers. UPM Specialty Papers alone sold €1,315 million. It has signed a non-binding letter of intent with Sappi to form a graphic paper joint venture, and it closed paper production at Ettringen and Kaukas.
• Stora Enso (Finland): group sales of EUR 9.3 billion in 2025, with packaging, biomaterials and wood products in the mix.
• Mondi (United Kingdom): €7,663 million in sales for 2025 from corrugated and sustainable packaging, virgin containerboard, kraft paper and uncoated fine paper.
• Essity (Sweden): SEK 138,494 million of 2025 net sales, about $14.11 billion, from hygiene and tissue, which makes it a roughly $14 billion company. Its annual report lists 3,235,496 tons of product.

Largest Paper Companies in Asia and Latin America

The largest paper companies in Asia-Pacific and Latin America are Nine Dragons Paper, Oji Holdings and Suzano with sales close to or in excess of $9 billion. Nine Dragons is the largest manufacturer by tonnes among those that publish comparable figures, Oji is the largest Japanese group on this list, and Suzano believes it’s the world’s largest producer of market pulp.

• Nine Dragons Paper (China) reported revenue of 75.00 billion RMB in the year to June 2026, up 18.6%, with packaging paper at the core and 2.9 billion square meters of downstream packaging capacity.
• Oji Holdings (Japan): net sales of ¥1,861.7 billion in the year to March 2026, with Household and Industrial Materials its largest reporting segment at ¥943.3 billion.
• Suzano (Brazil): record net revenue of R$50 billion in 2025 on 14.2 million tonnes of pulp and paper sold, a 15% rise. Its annual filing shows 12.49 million tonnes of that was market pulp, from 13.4 million tonnes of eucalyptus pulp capacity, which makes it a major exporter of kraft pulp in the global pulp trade.

Which Companies Lead Each Paper Grade?

No company leads every grade. Smurfit Westrock and Nine Dragons lead containerboard; Suzano leads market pulp; Arbex and Georgia-Pacific anchor tissue; and UPM is a large player in specialty paper. Each row below names a company to start with, and its filed figure, as leadership in a given grade changes regionally and production technologies differ by grade.

Grades also define who buys what from whom. Mills producing testliner and kraft liner generally run different furnish on similar equipment, and a paperboard manufacturer using the solid bleached sulfate grade would need a mill with a multi-ply former and bleached fiber. Non-integrated mills source from the market pulp suppliers led by Suzano and others.

Deals That Reset the Ranking Since 2024

Five completed or announced corporate changes since 2024 among the top packaging groups and leading paper and pulp producers help explain why older lists differ. Any ranking that still shows WestRock, Smurfit Kappa, or DS Smith as separate entities predates these moves. So do pages that name Nippon Unipac or reflect 2016 sales. Compare entities for the same fiscal year, because pro-forma figures and reported figures vary in a deal year.

Is Paper a Declining Industry?

Paper is declining fastest in printing grades, while US containerboard output fell and European packaging held flat. FAO reports that worldwide paper and paperboard output rose 4% in 2024. US paper and paperboard production fell 3.7% to 66.3 million tons in 2025, according to the AF&PA capacity survey, and big companies are closing older mills while spending on selected new ones.

That US production decline amounts to millions of tons in a single year. Printing paper had the steepest percentage fall. US printing-writing capacity dropped 13.9% in 2025 to 7.7 million tons, and in Europe graphic paper production fell 7.3%, according to Cepi. Newsprint and coated paper are in this shrinking group as well.

Packaging is not exempt from these declines, which many summaries miss. US containerboard production fell 4.4% to 36.1 million tons and capacity fell 5.1%, with mills still running at 91.9%. International Paper closed the Red River mill in Campti, Louisiana, and its Savannah and Riceboro mills in Georgia; the last two alone removed about one million net tons and roughly 1,100 jobs. In Europe, Cepi calls packaging grades stable overall, though cartonboard fell 5.4%, and its preliminary report has China’s output up 2.9%.

A headline pulp and paper market size, such as the $351.7 billion Fortune Business Insights gives for 2025, hides all of this, so use it as background only. Regulation is the next driver for packaging industries selling into Europe. The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation entered into force in February 2025 and its rules began applying on a phased basis from 12 August 2026. For a capacity plan in the US or Europe, the practical reading is grade by grade: a new printing line needs a far stronger case than a tissue or packaging one, and a US containerboard line should weigh mills that ran at 91.9% last year and above 94.5% in the two latest reported quarters.

What a New Paper Machine Costs and Who Builds It

A large, high-speed paper machine can cost tens of millions of euros on its own, and a full new mill can run past $1 billion. According to Valmet, the price range for a high-end sack and kraft paper machine is between EUR 35 million and EUR 50 million, and Graphic Packaging puts the price for the Waco project at $1.67 billion. Always confirm whether a quoted price covers a machine or a mill.

That scope line is where most budgets go wrong. A Valmet order for Guangxi Jianhui Paper covers papermaking equipment; a mill project adds stock preparation, buildings, power and steam, water treatment, installation and commissioning. The $1.67 billion Waco budget is more than ten times Valmet’s machine range, and neither figure is wrong because they’re pricing different things.

Suppliers break into two tiers. In our read of the market, the largest, highest-speed projects go to a small set of established European builders; our list of pulp and paper equipment manufacturers covers them, along with suppliers of paper machine clothing and other wear parts. Mid-sized mills source from regional builders, including kraft paper machine manufacturers and tissue paper machine manufacturers.

Henan Zejiang Paper Machinery is one of those regional builders, working with mid-sized mills. The largest and highest speed projects aren’t a segment in which we compete. Our kraft and corrugated page gives a typical capacity fit of 10 to 750 tonnes per day at 1600 to 5000 mm trim width, 30 to 380 m/min and 70 to 250 gsm for that equipment class; our tissue page gives 5 to more than 100 tonnes per day at 13 to 40 gsm for its class. These are typical ranges for each equipment class, and our engineers confirm the exact build against your grade, fibre and speed. For a mill planning its first line or adding a line, a turnkey paper mill project would set the scope, before the price of any machine is even compared.

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