Visualizing Turnaround Strategies over Time in a Volatile Commodity Industry

Abstract

With the rise of the internet and electronic media, the first two decades of the 21st century have seen a rapid decline in demand for printing and writing paper. This study creates a visual representation of how pulp and paper companies’ strategies have changed over time, based on a four-quadrant turnaround strategy model developed by Pretorius (2008). It examines the strategies of forty such companies operating in North America and northern Europe over a fourteen-year period from 2004 to 2018. Companies that were most exposed to products with declining market demand tended to be the most likely to require financial restructuring; these companies also had to make simultaneous operational and strategic changes in order to stay in business. In contradiction of the turnaround model, companies responded to some types of external turnaround causes with operating (rather than strategic) actions. Companies operating in commodity industries must often adapt their strategies to deal with cyclical downturns; this contingency is not well reflected in the extant turnaround literature.