Valmet

Anhui Linping's PM 9 is the clearest case: a complete board line from headbox to winder for lightweight fluting and liner, ordered in October 2026 for a 2028 start-up, at a site where Valmet installed PM 8. It was followed within three weeks by a coated board line for an unnamed Asian producer, also a 2028 start-up, also bundled with automation and lifecycle services.

The clearest strategic act of the last two years is a portfolio exchange in flow control. Valmet paid USD 480 million for Severn Group, completed on 1 July 2026, acquiring severe-service valve capability with manufacturing in the USA, UK and India, explicitly to take Flow Control beyond its biomaterials base into mining, refining and chemicals. That purchase sits on top of organically built capacity: a Sorocaba plant rated above 12,000 valve sets a year alongside a service centre, and a combined service centre and manufacturing unit in Sydney aimed at mining, metals and refining as much as pulp.

A refiner gap is a dimension inside a hot, steam-filled, abrasive space. The workaround is differential measurement: track the position of the processing element that is being moved, and separately the position of the actuating unit that moves it. The difference is the clearance that has developed in the adjustment mechanism, so the wear estimate comes from two readings taken outside the refining zone.

Beskidy chose its machine on low electricity and gas consumption at a defined production volume, and said so. Irving's third through-air-drying machine came inside a USD 600 million site expansion, which is the other way tissue gets bought — as a package with converting and warehousing rather than as a standalone machine.

3D Fiber launched in June 2026, and within three months the first commercial-scale line was ordered for Metsä Group's Äänekoski site, with start-up in 2028, a nominal capacity above 100 million products a year and booking in the third quarter of 2026. In October 2026 the company extended its piloting collaboration with VTT at Jyväskylä to carry fibre-based products from early development through demonstration.

A refining bar dulls as it wears, so one plate design puts cavities inside the bar itself: shallower at the leading edge, deeper at the trailing edge. As the bar wears down, hidden edges emerge gradually and the refining action stays closer to constant across the plate's life. Pressure is the other wear driver. In the last box before the plate's outer periphery, pressure peaks form and erode unevenly, so at least three bars carry a fluid connection within 0 to 15 mm of the last dam, equalising pressure between neighbouring final boxes.

The automation work with named external customers is measurement. Two IQ quality control systems went to Vietnamese tissue lines, and a corrugator warp control system went to a US corrugated box producer whose problem was moisture imbalance rather than papermaking as such. The virtual sensor launch in April 2026 sells the same way, as a prediction product that reduces fibre and starch rather than as part of a control platform.