Neither e-mail nor the quest for a paperless office has dented our love of paper. Newspapers are stuffed with ever more leaflets. Everything is packaged. But paper and packaging companies have had a terrible time. The Bloomberg world forest products and paper index has underperformed global stocks by 23 per cent over 12 months, falling by a fifth.

In Europe the industry’s problems are familiar. With only moderate top-line growth, excess capacity keeps a downward hand on prices. There was a round of capacity closures in 2006, when shares rallied, but factory utilisation rates are still not high enough to strengthen bargaining positions. Worse, low single-digit price rises can be easily swamped by rising energy costs (as happened in 2006), higher wood/pulp costs (2007) or the appreciation of the euro. This year a potential hike in the tariff on Russian wood exports and possible strikes in Finland threaten input prices.