BPIF CEO Charles Jarrold appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Wake Up to Money show this morning (17 February) to explain how the lack of supply was being made worse by the ongoing strike action at UPM in Finland. 

“It’s not a great scenario. We very much hope the parties involved will sit down and resolve this dispute. They clearly need to,” Jarrold stated. 

“The issue right now, among our label members and label converters and printers across the country, is they’ve got significant shortages of key stocks. 

“They are just about managing but it is causing some interruption,” he added. 

Jarrold said the BPIF was talking to the government about the crisis.

“Clearly if this dispute carries on, it has a couple of effects. Firstly it risks company viability. Then the knock-on consequence is that the food and pharmaceutical sectors are affected,” he explained to host Felicity Hannah.

FINAT board member Will Parker, who featured in a Printweek update on the UPM situation yesterday, also appeared on this morning's Today show on BBC Radio 4. 

He explained to business presenter Sean Farrington how the “laudable migration to sustainability and away from plastics”, together with the boom in e-commerce, had put a "big pull on the total capacity for paper". 

“All of that is creating a perfect storm where localised industrial action is having what could be a potentially cumulative and large effect across the continent,” he said. 

Parker said that lead time extension on materials normally available within a number of days or next day, where now “potentially May or June because there’s a constraint on materials”.

“That means we’re having as an industry to reduce or allocate production capacity to customers,” he explained. 

“That could, if it doesn’t get rectified in the short-term, mean an impact on [what's on] shelves.”

He said the labels industry had seen “the greatest price increases over the last 18 months as we have seen in last 20 years.”

Farrington noted how the lack of paper has already impacted some substantial print jobs including clothing catalogues, while asset manager Abrdn has had to delay a mega mail out connected to a proposed £1.5bn takeover deal because it can’t get hold of enough paper to send out the necessary documents to shareholders. 

Separately, today the Finnish Paperworkers' Union said "no progress has been made so far" in negotiations to solve the situation.