Altri, the Portuguese eucalyptus pulp group behind the Celbi, Caima and Biotek mills, presented second-quarter results on July 24 that read like a recovery chart: EBITDA rebounded to €30.0 million in the quarter, roughly level with the €28.2 million reported a year earlier and a world away from the €5.4 million posted in the storm-battered first quarter. First-half revenue came to €365 million, down only 2 percent from the same period of 2025 — a resilient print for a company that spent the winter fighting weather, not markets.
The first quarter had been hit by severe storms in Portugal that hurt wood availability, logistics and mill efficiency. By the end of the second quarter, management said, those conditions had largely normalised — and the P&L shows it. For readers of Nordic forest-industry reports, the shape is familiar: the same half-year in which Finnish and Swedish pulp producers wrestled with soft European pulp pricing, Altri’s problem was physical supply, and it has now cleared.
Caima’s chemistry ramp begins
The strategic story sits in the smaller mills. At Caima in Constância, the €25 million acetic acid and furfural project entered ramp-up in June 2026, with full commercial production expected by year-end. The company projects €6–7 million in annual revenues at roughly 80 percent EBITDA margins and an unlevered internal rate of return above 15 percent — small numbers, but the highest-margin ones in the group, extracted from side-streams the mill used to burn.
The dissolving-pulp pivot
The bigger swing is at Biotek in Vila Velha de Ródão, where the conversion towards dissolving pulp — the feedstock for viscose and other textile fibres — is accelerating. Production capacity already exceeds 180 thousand tonnes, with potential beyond 200 thousand, and Altri points to a 44 percent price premium for dissolving pulp over hardwood paper pulp on 2020–2025 averages. Specialty cellulose has long been a Northern European discipline — Norway’s Borregaard built a global business on it — and Altri is effectively arguing that Iberian eucalyptus, with its short rotation cycles, can compete in the value segments the north pioneered.
Why the corridor should care
Altri sells the overwhelming majority of its pulp outside Portugal, into a European market whose reference producers — and reference customers — sit in Finland and Sweden. Every quarter in which a Portuguese mill system holds margins through a supply shock while pivoting up the value chain strengthens the case that the Iberian fibre basket belongs in Nordic procurement conversations, whether the buyer is a tissue converter, a textile-fibre house or a speciality-chemicals formulator. The group’s corridor footprint is tracked in our Altri company profile.
What to watch next
Three markers for the second half: whether pulp pricing follows the recovery management expects, whether the Caima chemicals ramp hits full commercial production on schedule, and how quickly Biotek’s dissolving-pulp order book fills — and from which geographies. A first Nordic offtake in speciality cellulose would turn a strategy slide into a corridor story. Alongside Corticeira Amorim’s H1 and Navigator’s tissue expansion, it completes a picture of Portugal’s forest-products trio investing through the cycle — each with a northern market in its sights.