This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
By the numbers: Q2 2025
Net sales: $6.77B
Up 14.7% year over year
Net sales packaging North America: $3.86B
Up 6.4% year over year
Net sales packaging EMEA: $2.29B
Compared with $328M in Q2 2024, prior to DS Smith acquisition
Net earnings: $75M
Compared with a net earnings of $498M in Q2 2024
- Integration progress: International Paper’s second-quarter revenue met expectations and “we have confidence in closing the market share gap in North America this year, even as the U.S. and EMEA markets remain soft,” said CEO Andy Silvernail during Thursday’s Q2 earnings call. He highlighted integration progress since IP acquired DS Smith six months ago, including completing the required divestiture of five European plants to Palm Group. The packaging segment experienced seasonally higher demand in North America during Q2, but that was offset by softer demand in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
- Business transformation: IP’s transformation under the 80/20 optimization strategy is on track, Silvernail said, with IP having adopted the plan a year ago and the DS Smith portion of the business starting implementation a few months ago. “While our two regional packaging businesses are at different stages in this journey, they're both executing a similar framework to achieve our 2027 targets,” Silvernail said. “We’re gaining traction and customers have noticed.” He added: “Literally, in a two-year period of time, we've gone from a dramatically underperforming set of assets to one that is performing quite well and winning back share.”
- Mill performance: IP is dealing with ongoing mill reliability issues in both North America and EMEA, with Silvernail noting the mill system cost performance is “not where we want them to be, but we have a clear line of sight to improvements,” meaning a capital redeployment strategy. The company is only about six months into that improvement journey, he said. “Year-to-date, we have left about $150 million of profit on the table due to reliability issues.”
- Economy and tariffs: Volumes in Q2 were softer than anticipated, reflecting ongoing economic uncertainty, executives said. Some demand recovered in June, and that momentum is expected to continue into Q3. “Industry demand in North America has been relatively stable, but softer than last year as economic uncertainty from tariffs continues to impact industrial production and box demand across the manufacturing sector,” Silvernail said. Across industrial production, “the goods economy is still pretty constrained” and “everybody is pretty cautious,” he said.
- Global cellulose fiber segment: Earnings and volumes fell quarter on quarter in the global cellulose fiber business. IP is still examining a sale of its GCF business to become a pure-play packaging business, but “the markets have been tough” due to “the bumpiness in the macroeconomic environment,” Silvernail said. Still, he stood by the previous timeline to “close it by the end of the year.”
- Outlook: Executives said this round of earnings will be the last where they break out the legacy DS Smith business from North American packaging results. They expect earnings to rise sequentially in the third quarter, driven by higher volumes and lower costs across all business segments. In Q3, IP anticipates a $10 million incremental benefit from previous price increases. Planned maintenance outages will ease in Q3; they were heaviest in Q2, with 80% of 2025’s planned outages occurring in the first half of the year.
