Special Paper 39
An End of the Millennium Performance Review
of the North American Paper Industry
Dorothy Paun, Pantipa Tachawachira, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, Shelley
Gardner, Randy Cantrell,
Barb Miele, Jeff Comnick, Jason Cross, and Tracy Ho
December 2001
Executive Summary
A financial analysis of the North America pulp, paper, and packaging industry was conducted using data from the 1999 annual reports of publicly traded firms in the U.S. and Canada. This study is the sixth consecutive performance review of the industry published by researchers from the University of Washington. Goals of these analyses are to categorize all publicly traded U.S. and Canadian pulp, paper, and packaging companies into primary product sectors so as to compare direct competitors; investigate industry performance by analyzing annual sales, return on equity, and earnings per share; examine risk assessment through calculating debt to equity ratios; explore future investments in capital expenditures and intensity analysis, and view worldwide business activities.