📌 Price

Fastmarkets reports market prices for commodities such as pulp, paper, paperboard, wood products, etc.
Key characteristics:

• Frequency: Mostly reported monthly
• Where to find them:
  • Price Tables (Workspaces → Price Tables)
  • Markets
  • Newsletters & Reports
  • Forecasts

These prices reflect actual market transactions, assessments, and benchmarks collected by Fastmarkets through its methodology and price‑reporting processes.

📌 Cost

Fastmarkets’ cost figures represent estimates of what it costs to produce a product, not market prices.

These are shown in Fastmarkets’ Cost Benchmarking tools and include:

Cash (production) cost
The core estimate of the cost incurred to produce pulp, paper, or wood products. Costs directly tied to production inputs (e.g., raw materials, energy, chemicals).

Direct cost
Cash cost plus capital charges (depreciation + capital cost).

Total cost
Includes direct costs plus overheads, maintenance, labor, depreciation and other factors.

How cost estimates are calculated

Fastmarkets derives these values based on:

• Publicly available information (company reports, industry disclosures, technical data)
• Mass and energy balance models built by Fastmarkets analysts, which estimate:
  • Input requirements
  • Yield factors
  • Energy consumption
  • Chemical usage
  • Operating assumptions

These models enable comparisons of mills on a like‑for‑like basis, independent of market price volatility.