SAPPI: Manufacturing for a Changing Market
Adapting and adjusting to meet the needs of modern industry, Sappi is aiming to build partnerships to drive competitiveness. Dr Beverley Sukhdeo has grown alongside the company for the past 15 years, and she is now leading operations as this South African specialist repositions itself for the long-term.
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South Africa’s packaging market is being pulled in several directions at once. Industry research valued the sector at $11.33 billion dollars in 2025, growing toward $14.71 billion by 2031, with paper and paperboard still commanding almost two-thirds of that revenue even as brand owners chase recyclable, mono-material alternatives and pharmaceutical packaging emerges as the fastest-growing segment of all. A record citrus export season, more than 163 million cartons in 2024-25 alone, has pushed demand for sturdy corrugated packaging so hard that mills have had to add capacity just to keep pace, while persistent rail and port constraints mean that capacity alone is never quite enough.
Sappi, marking its 90th year in business through its Southern Africa operations, sits inside that pressure, running four mills across the country and adjusting its own product mix in real time to match where the market is actually heading. “Our core focus is cost competitiveness and reducing the cost of production,” says VP Manufacturing and Engineering Dr Beverley Sukhdeo. “With all of the conditions and the volatile environment that is present right now – fuel charges, raw material costs and so on – there have been significant challenges. Our short-term view is about managing the costs in our environment and what opportunities exist in the market.”
That cost discipline sits alongside a broader recognition that the business itself has to keep changing shape, and that the people running it matter as much as the equipment. “We still have to focus on our people, and there is a balance between training and development to ensure you bring on competent people to perform effectively while at the same time keeping them motivated and accountable. That is a key focus area for us at all levels of the business,” Sukhdeo says.
The same restructuring instinct applies to the plant floor. “We have to revisit our strategy and look at what remains, what needs to change, and what has changed in the external environment,” she explains. “For example, on the pulp side, when people find alternatives for your typical products, how do you restructure and look at your equipment to better match what the market needs.” Sappi’s product range spans paper grades, containerboard, dissolving pulp and viscose pulp, giving the group room to shift weight between segments as demand moves, rather than depending on any single product line to carry the business through a downturn.
STAYING COMPETITIVE
The company’s flexibility is most visible in the shift away from graphic papers toward packaging. “A lot of our operations are transitioning more into packaging rather than graphics, where we had calendars and magazines and so on. We are now doing less of that, but we remain well-positioned in those markets,” Sukhdeo says.
That pivot is clear in containerboard, where Sappi has been expanding capacity specifically to serve South Africa’s booming fruit export industry, adding some 220,000 metric tons of containerboard capacity to meet demand no longer being met by domestic linerboard supply alone. “Our assets are typically focused on packaging and, in South Africa, we supply containerboard for boxes that are used in the fruit export market,” Sukhdeo says. “These boxes need to be strong enough to retain their structure under varying conditions and provide protection for the goods they carry.” Much of that output is exported directly alongside the produce it protects, tying Sappi’s own fortunes to the continued strength of South African agriculture abroad.
Diversification runs deeper still on the pulp side, where Sappi supplies materials that rarely get associated with a paper company. “We also do dissolving pulp, which is used in a variety of materials including pharmaceuticals, screeds, and many more that people typically don’t associate with pulp. We also produce viscose pulp, which is a key ingredient in viscose fabrics,” Sukhdeo explains, a spread that positions the business inside some of the packaging market’s fastest-growing end uses, pharmaceutical and medical packaging key among them, without abandoning the forestry roots the group was built on.
Technology is being pulled into that same restructuring effort. “With all of the development of digital technology, we are looking at how we can respond and manage processes better, including using AI tools that can allow us to optimise and streamline processes,” Sukhdeo says, describing tools aimed at the infrastructure constraints, particularly rail and port bottlenecks, that continue to complicate production and export logistics across the industry.
PEOPLE AND PARTNERS
Sukhdeo’s own path through the business mirrors the kind of internal mobility she now expects to sustain the group. “I started on a graduate training programme and worked across various areas of the business, starting in technical and engineering before progressing to marketing and operations,” she says, of a career that eventually saw her become GM for three of Sappi’s four South African mills, Saiccor, Ngodwana and Stanger, before a doctorate in business administration and a move into group-wide manufacturing leadership.
Her approach remains hands-on. “Key for us is harnessing the diversity of perspective when creating solutions,” she says, pointing to the company’s most recent independent recognition as evidence the culture matches the intent. Forbes and Statista ranked Sappi second in South Africa, 144th globally, on their 2025 World’s Top Companies for Women list, and fifth in South Africa, 289th globally, among World’s Best Employers, rankings built on surveys of more than 120,000 women and 300,000 employees worldwide respectively. “We are a very capital-intensive industry, and the fact that women enjoy working here speaks volumes about the leadership in the business at all levels.”
That same discipline extends outward into how Sappi selects the partners it depends on. “When we look at supply chain, we ensure there is alignment in values. Integrity, being able to execute safely with speed, lateral thinking, reliability, and their ability to think constantly about the value they bring to us are all critical,” Sukhdeo says. Relationships are expected to run in both directions rather than settling for the basics. “We want our partners to think outside the box. We share the standard, the basics that keep us going, but we have to think years ahead around how the supply chain integrates with us to co-create solutions that allow us both to be competitive.”
That same principle extends into the communities surrounding Sappi’s mills. “In South Africa, we have to work with local communities and create opportunities, and that is why we do a lot of work to upskill,” she notes. “Our large sites have skills centres which teach entry level technical and business skills, including welding or engineering, and allow for opportunities for people to eventually come and work in our plants.”
Community investment reaches well beyond the mill gate. Sappi Khulisa, the group’s enterprise and supplier development programme, has run for over four decades, supporting more than 4,000 small growers and 1,000 adjacent suppliers while procuring over R4 billion in wood fibre since 1995. A multi-year partnership with WWF South Africa in the uMkhomazi catchment has cleared 191 hectares of invasive alien plants, brought over 2,322 hectares of rangeland under improved management, and identified more than 20,000 hectares for potential protection under a new biodiversity stewardship strategy, work Sappi South Africa CEO Graeme Wild has described as essential to securing the water resources on which mills, farms and cities all depend. Sappi has also joined a global initiative to eliminate harmful chemicals from fashion supply chains, extending its sustainability commitments beyond its own operations and into the viscose fabrics its pulp ultimately becomes.
Together, that combination of quality, environmental stewardship and economic upliftment is what Sukhdeo believes sets Sappi apart in a market where every competitor claims to be sustainable. “I believe that we are a company that is resilient. We go through trying times, but we get out the other side in a better position. It creates a platform for us to reinvent ourselves and to look at what we’re doing. We have been through these cycles many times,” she says.
That lasting resilience, she says, always traces back to the same source. “We value people, and we build a culture that says we depend on our people to be engaged to deliver value.” It is also rooted in what the business is fundamentally made from. “One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we are a renewable resource company. Trees are a renewable resource, and we focus on how to best create value from everything we have,” Sukhdeo says.
“Whether paper grades, containerboard or pulp, we produce through innovation and we learn more and more each day through collaboration. We don’t have to know it all, but we do need to know who knows, and these things help position us very well in the spaces we are in.”