2023 is starting off with uncertainty, time will tell how the year ends up.

On second thought, that was a silly sentence, and likely applies to all years.

Nevertheless, we are starting off 2023 with some doubts. The container and packaging business, extending into even aluminum, steel and glass, not just cellulose based products, seems a bit soft.

Tissue is tissue, as long as manufacturers don't get greedy and expand ahead of this very predictable market. As a reminder, the tissue market is almost perfectly aligned with the population growth.

Newsprint continues to close out its one-hundred-and-eighty-year run. Will the last person to leave the last newsprint mill turn out the lights?

Printing and writing grades are bouncing around at their historically low levels, with occasional, scattered, brief glimpses of optimism.

Other forest products, related to the housing markets, are feeling the effects of interest rates rising.

OK, give us some good news, Jim.

I think this is a time of focusing inside the fence, not on markets. The technology improvements of the last few years, especially in software (Industry 4.0) and sensors (Industry 4.0), when closely examined, knocks one's socks off. Profitability improvements will rely on efficiency and cost cutting available by these bolt-on opportunities.

In fact, get out your wrenches, these opportunities are becoming mandatory. For if your competitors do them, cutting their costs of production, and you don't, you will be left in a vulnerable position should they be willing to accept lower prices for their finished goods, all the while maintaining their margins.

Yes, it is the year to turn your Duesenberg of a mill into a McClaren. The old technology, great in its day, will not cut it going forward.

Jim Thompson is CEO of Paperitalo Publications.