At the order signing ceremony in Shanghai participated the special deputy of the German government, dignitary Dr. Annette Schavan, Minister for Education and Research and Mr Dequan Chen, Representative of Hunan Province Government.

This significant business conclusion underlines the huge growth prospects in the Chinese paper market. The Chinese government expects paper and board demand in China to reach or exceed 80 million tons/year by 2010.

"Built to produce 400,000 tons of paper a year, these two machines will help us achieve annual revenue of 2,5 million Euro, bring along GDP rise of 1,6  billion Euro from associated industries, while providing over 5,000 employment opportunities", proudly stated Wu Jialin, Chairman of the Board of Yueyang Forest & Paper Group, "And we have full confidence to accomplish the project with Voith Paper as our major partner."

The new machines, PM 9 and PM 10, are identical and will be built according to one-platform concept and feature state-of-art technology. With a wire width of 5,85 m and with the design speed of 1,400 m/min, both machines will produce 200,000 tons of printing paper per year.

The start-ups are scheduled in the third quarter of 2009.

Tiger Forest & Paper Group is among the ten largest paper and board suppliers in China with a capacity of 950,000 tons per year and 20 sales offices in China.

Voith Paper is a division of Voith and is one of the leading partners to the paper industry. Voith Paper optimizes the paper production process through constant innovations. More than a third of worldwide paper production is produced on Voith Paper machines.

Voith sets standards in paper, energy, mobility and service markets. Founded on January 1, 1867, Voith has a current workforce of 37,000, sales of EUR 4 billion and over 270 locations worldwide. It is one of the largest family-owned enterprises in Europe.

Voith is an official partner to the initiative "Germany - Land of Ideas".