Good morning. My name is Guy Trottier. I'm the general manager of a pulp and paper mill located in Quebec City. We're right next to the Chateau Frontenac. We're owned by White Birch Paper. This mill has been in operation since 1927, which is 99 years of operation. I've had the privilege of being involved with the company for over 35 years.
Our business was formerly steered toward newsprint manufacturing, with products sold worldwide. India was a major customer for products but has completely faded away in the last few years as we have observed changes in business relations between the countries. With the decline in demand for newsprint both locally and internationally, our production site has engaged in a strong diversification effort to reposition our production line.
We now have three niche segments: high brightness paper, recycled kraft and recycled paperboard. Our most recent project involved converting machine one from newsprint to recycled kraft paper.
We were pursuing several goals in this conversion. We wanted to reduce our consumption of wood chips. The increased tariffs on lumber have made Quebec's wood chips less available and more costly. The second thing we were pursuing was to steer our production toward products with increasing demand versus newsprint and to position our manufacturing site away from mega-producers of commodity products. We also wanted to become a large recycling centre and to bring a plastic substitution replacement solution to the market.
We successfully started this new operation. A few months after start-up, at the beginning of 2025, the threat of tariffs emerged in the United States. Our products' destination was 90% to U.S. originally, but this had us revise our position and steer sales differently.
Nevertheless, if tariffs had been imposed at this critical point in time, which was early 2025, it would have potentially ruined all our efforts toward this project. We have now diversified our product portfolio and fully ramped up production and sales, a success that came with a massive internal effort by our team.
This project was initially presented in 2022 and benefited from the electricity rebate program from the Quebec Ministry of Finance. That was a strong tailwind that allowed us to reduce the risk of the project and come up with an attractive return on investment. The electricity rebate program came to an end at the end of 2025. That's really important to mention. It is now difficult to bring additional projects to life in light of this.
Our mill has presented a new project aiming at consolidating the future of our production site. We are now looking for ways to support this new effort. Over the last seven years, we've had the opportunity to visit a few dozen pulp and paper production sites around the world. Right now, China has become the largest producer. It used to be the United States. Now it really is China, and the United States is second.
Worldwide, what we're witnessing is large investments in new manufacturing sites. We're also seeing massive upgrades of existing ones. Mills in Quebec and Canada that previously benefited from an abundant wood chip supply and energy sources are now competing against really big machines, and we are basically trailing behind in this industry right now. The worldwide competition is increasingly fierce.
The world is changing. The way that countries do business together has changed as well. The big question now becomes how we work together to provide future generations with an opportunity to continue manufacturing operations in this new environment.
Thank you.