Metsä Board, a division of Metsä Group, announces plans to close its Tako board mill and improve the efficiency of its Kyro mill in an effort to enhance profitability and competitiveness. These measures involve change negotiations affecting approximately 360 employees, with up to 215 potential job reductions. The negotiations, expected to last at least six weeks, may result in the cessation of production at the Tako mill by the end of 2025. This announcement was made on January 16, 2025, by Metsä Board​.

The company reports that production at Tako and Kyro mills has consistently fallen short of capacity due to a weak market environment, leading to significant losses in 2023 and 2024. The Tako mill faces additional challenges, including high energy costs and the constraints of its city-center location in Tampere. Despite this, Metsä Board assures customers that its overall capacity of 1.6 million tonnes of folding boxboard per year is sufficient to meet demand, even with the potential closure of Tako, which contributes 13% of current capacity.

If implemented, these measures are expected to improve Metsä Board's comparable EBITDA by approximately Euro 30 million annually. However, they would also incur a Euro 30 million write-down in assets, recognized in the Q1 2025 operating result. Additional costs related to redundancies and restructuring will be specified later.

CEO Mika Joukio acknowledged the difficulty of these decisions, emphasizing the need for strategic action to secure long-term financial stability and support ongoing and planned investments to enhance mill competitiveness.