North America containerboard quarterly: Q4 2024

As we welcome the holiday season, containerboard producers are getting ready for a nice gift: price increases of ~7% across various grades at the beginning of January 2025. At the same time, President-elect Trump will take office, backed by a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives. His policies will have implications for the US economy and trade, including the containerboard sector. According to our latest forecasts, US containerboard demand is set to expand by a 3% CAGR in the next 24 months, while supply will remain flat due to capacity optimization. We expect double-digit growth in linerboard pricing, due to strong industry fundamentals and higher inflationary pressure.

It has been one year since we launched the RaboResearch containerboard forecast tool. To mark this milestone, we will also dig into our past forecast results and examine how we did against the actual data.