Essity, the Stockholm-headquartered hygiene and health group behind Tena, Libero and Colhogar, closed the first half of 2026 with the kind of quarter investors have come to expect from the sector’s steadiest operator: net sales up 2.6% year-on-year to SEK 35.1 billion in Q2, organic growth of 0.3%, and volumes doing the work — up 1.4%, partially offset by a negative 1.1% from price and mix. For readers of this publication, the more interesting story sits below the income statement: the group’s global back office increasingly runs through Lisbon.
The quarterly report, presented on 16 July, showed adjusted EBITA broadly stable at SEK 4.7 billion, with the adjusted margin easing to 13.4% from 13.7% a year earlier as input costs pressed on profitability. Growth remained strongest in Incontinence Products Retail, Feminine Care and Medical Solutions, with Professional Hygiene expanding on higher volumes and favourable mix. Consumer Tissue — the category Portuguese shoppers know through Colhogar — declined on lower prices and volumes, a familiar pattern in a European tissue market still digesting capacity and pulp-price swings.
One of two hubs worldwide — and it is in Parque das Nações
Essity’s Portuguese story is not a factory story. The group supplies the Iberian market from its Spanish plants and runs no production in Portugal. What it runs instead is arguably more strategic: a global shared services centre in Lisbon’s Parque das Nações, created in 2022, one of only two such hubs in the entire group — the other being Santa Fé in Mexico. The Lisbon team handles customer management, purchasing administration, finance, human resources and IT services for a company that sells in roughly 150 countries and whose products are used by a billion people every day.
Speaking to Portuguese journalists at the group’s Stockholm headquarters earlier this year, vice-president of corporate affairs Per Lorentz described the Lisbon operation as “very important”, serving the whole of Essity, and was explicit about the logic of the location: “We want predictability, stability and an economy that is growing, but not too fast.” His commitment on the direction of travel was equally direct: “We will continue to grow in Portugal.” The operation employs around 360 people, with Essity generating roughly €65 million in sales in the Portuguese market.
Why a back office is corridor news
Shared services centres rarely make headlines, but they are among the stickiest forms of foreign direct investment a country can attract. Unlike a sales office, a global hub embeds a country into a multinational’s operating model: processes, systems and institutional knowledge accumulate locally, and each budget cycle tends to add functions rather than remove them. Lisbon’s win here follows the same pattern NorthSouth HQ has tracked across the corridor — Nordic and Nordic-adjacent groups placing global functions in Portugal for the combination of talent, cost, time zone and, increasingly, organisational stability.
Essity is also a useful barometer for the wider Swedish corporate presence in Portugal. It is one of roughly 260 Swedish companies operating in the country, which together employed more than 18,000 people in 2024 and have generated an estimated €4.2 billion for the Portuguese economy over five years, according to figures highlighted by the Swedish-Portuguese business community. The profile of that presence is shifting visibly from sales subsidiaries toward engineering centres, service hubs and acquisitions of industrial SMEs — a maturing of the relationship that this half-year report quietly confirms.
What to watch next: Essity’s margin trajectory into the second half, as the group balances input-cost pressure against its volume recovery; any announcement expanding the Lisbon centre’s functional scope; and whether the group’s Consumer Tissue repositioning changes the competitive picture for Iberian tissue players — including Portugal’s own Navigator, whose tissue expansion in Aveiro is aimed squarely at the shelf space where Colhogar lives.