For most of the last fifty years, tissue paper in this region was somebody else’s business. What happened next is a more complicated story than it might appear. For most of the last century, tissue paper in the Middle East and North Africa was somebody else’s business. The region consumed it, imported it, and placed foreign brands on supermarket shelves from Casablanca to Kuwait City. There were exceptions. Türkiye had machines running as far back as 1970. Morocco’s SIPAT started up in 1978. Kuwait followed in 1982. But these were isolated operations in a landscape defined by import dependence, serving fragments of local demand in markets that had neither the scale nor the industrial infrastructure to think much bigger.

The industry as it exists today is largely a product of the last thirty years. Its expansion has been broader, more sustained and ultimately more transformative than the investment cycles that preceded it. Country by country, machine by machine, the region has built a tissue manufacturing base with more than three million tons of annual capacity, exporting across Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.

The most consequential chapters are still being written — in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in Iraq, in countries that until very recently had no tissue machines at all. What the data shows, alongside the ambition, is also a more uncomfortable question about where all this capacity ultimately goes.

THE CAPACITY RACE

The machines that came online in the mid-1990s, in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, were modest by the standards that would follow. Speeds of 600 to 1,200 m/min, widths rarely exceeding 2.7 meters, annual capacities in the range of 9,000 to 30,000 tons. Enough to serve a portion of local demand, but not much more. Nobody was exporting anything significant.

The shift began in the mid-2000s. Jordan’s Al Snobar put in a 5.4-meter Valmet machine in 2007 with a 54,000-ton annual capacity — roughly double what most regional mills produced from a single line at the time. The UAE started building seriously. Iran moved with real conviction, commissioning machines that belonged in a different conversation entirely. By 2013, Pars Hayat had a 70,000-ton line running at 2,200 m/min. That figure — 70,000 tons from a single machine — had barely existed in the region five years earlier.

Today, a machine commissioned anywhere in the region routinely produces more in a year than an entire national industry managed in 1995. The average capacity of machines started up since 2020 sits above 50,000 tons — more than three times the average of those commissioned before 2000.

Worth noting alongside that trajectory: the region’s consumption picture is not uniform. Gulf markets are developing tissue habits comparable to mature European economies, while parts of the region facing economic strain or conflict are growing more slowly or contracting. Capacity additions justified by regional averages may meet a less even reality on the ground.

Fig. 1 — Cumulative installed tissue capacity growth, 1970–2028 (all tracked machines including future startups)

Fig. 2 — Tissue capacity additions by year, showing the four investment waves and the upcoming pipeline peak in 2026

TÜRKIYE AND SAUDI ARABIA: THE TWIN ENGINES

Türkiye’s story and Saudi Arabia’s story are worth telling separately, because they represent almost opposite positions in the regional picture — one a mature, export-saturated industry grappling with the consequences of its own success, the other a major import market in the middle of a determined push toward self-sufficiency.

Türkiye’s installed base exceeds 1.4 million tons of annual capacity, placing it among the top tissue-producing countries globally. The two dominant operators, Hayat Kimya and Lila Kagit, have each built portfolios of five and four 70,000-ton lines running at 2,200 m/min. Together with Ipek Kagit, Aktül, Essel and Europap Tezol, Türkiye produces far more tissue than it can absorb domestically. Consumption sits at around 750,000 tons a year, leaving the rest of installed capacity dependent on export markets, principally the UK, the United States, Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Morocco and destinations across the Middle East and Africa. Lila Kagit alone reaches over 80 countries. That is an impressive footprint, but it also means a substantial share of the country’s installed capacity is permanently dependent on export conditions it cannot control: freight costs, currency swings, competition from other low-cost producers and geopolitical disruption in neighboring markets.  Hayat Kimya has responded by building plants in Russia and Egypt and studying opportunities in Africa and Asia. Lila Kagit has a fifth 70,000-ton machine planned for 2027.

Saudi Arabia has built far less, but what it is building now is striking. The Kingdom remains one of the region’s largest tissue importers, and the current investment wave is explicitly designed to change that. MEPCO’s Juthor subsidiary and Crown Paper Mill are both expanding at the same time, backed by sovereign capital and linked to Vision 2030’s push for industrial localization. The Public Investment Fund’s 23% stake in MEPCO, completed in January 2024, made clear that tissue manufacturing has moved from commercial decision to national policy. Juthor’s TM6, an Andritz machine at King Abdullah Economic City expected online in 2027, will bring Juthor’s capacity to 120,000 tons. Saudi Paper Manufacturing’s PM5 came online in 2025. Crown Paper Mill, the UAE-headquartered producer that has built its tissue business in Abu Dhabi over three decades, will commission its first Saudi machine this year, a 60,000-ton expansion that takes the company’s total combined capacity to 165,000 tons. MEPCO already exports to 33 markets.

Fig. 3 — Operational and pipeline tissue capacity by country.

ALGERIA: FAST MOVER

A few years ago, Algeria barely featured in regional tissue discussions. Today it is one of the more interesting stories on the map. The country is already one of the three largest tissue markets in MENA by value, around $777 million, and has simultaneously become the region’s fastest-growing exporter, with export volumes growing at a compound annual rate of 57% between 2013 and 2024. That figure deserves a moment’s pause.

Faderco, through its WARAK subsidiary, anchors the local industry with two Valmet lines and a third 65,000-ton Advantage DCT 200TS at a new site in Mostaganem, due in 2028. The company has been explicit about its export ambitions, targeting Southern Europe, the UK and Africa. Africaine Paper Mills is already shipping 40% of its output abroad, to the Middle East, Spain, Portugal and Greece. WAFA Group’s 40,000-ton Toscotec line starts up in 2026.

Then, in February 2026, came the announcement that perhaps best captures the current mood. Hayat DHC, the Algerian arm of Turkish multinational Hayat, received official approval for a $103 million tissue facility in the Sidi Kada industrial zone near Relizane. The plant will produce 70,000 tons of jumbo rolls annually, alongside 24,275 tons of converted tissue and 20,000 tons of sanitary paper, and is expected to create around 960 direct jobs. Hayat has been present in Algeria since 2005, building brands in detergents and hygiene products including Papia tissue. The new plant takes the next logical step: making the base paper locally rather than importing it. The machine supplier hasn’t been disclosed yet.

Between Faderco, WAFA and Hayat DHC, Algeria is set to add more than 175,000 tons of new annual capacity over the next two to three years, on top of the 115,000 tons already operational. Algeria’s trajectory is one of the more watched in the region right now. The next few years will say a lot about whether the export ambitions translate into sustained market positions or remain a work in progress.

NEW ENTRANTS

The most telling entries in this year’s Tissue Producers in the Middle East and North Africa survey are not the largest, they are the newest, particularly in markets where tissue manufacturing barely existed before.

Iraq commissioned its first significant tissue machine in 2023, when AlSindyian brought a rebuilt Toscotec line online. Al Shomokh Paper followed in 2025 with a rebuilt A.Celli machine. For a country of 48 million people that has historically imported most of its tissue, these are genuinely first steps. Jordan’s Sanabel Al Ataa Paper Mill started up its first Baosuo-supplied machine in 2025 and is bringing a second online later this year — part of a broader shift, alongside White Hygiene’s Hicredit machine in Egypt, that has seen Chinese tissue production machinery enter the region for the first time. Qatar, where Zain Paper Industry has placed an order for four OverMade machines totaling 120,000 tons of annual capacity — the first two due in 2026 and two further units in 2028 — represents one of the most concentrated single-operator investments in the survey. The scale, in a country whose domestic market is unlikely to absorb the full output, makes the export ambition self-evident. Egypt continues to add lines; White Hygiene’s machine started up in January 2026 and Alex Converta’s PM2 is due in 2027.

The broader pattern is one of countries deciding — sometimes for commercial reasons, sometimes for policy reasons, sometimes for both — that importing tissue indefinitely is no longer the plan. It has played out across the region at different speeds and with different results, but the direction has been consistent.

Beyond their domestic markets, regional producers ship into a familiar set of corridors. Türkiye dominates exports to the UK and Western Europe, Egypt and Tunisia anchor intra-African trade, and Algerian producers are now pushing into Southern Europe. These flows will shift as Saudi Arabia and Iraq build out the capacity to supply themselves, compressing some of the corridors Türkish mills have traditionally relied on.

THE MACHINERY MARKET

One dimension of this survey that doesn’t always get sufficient attention is what the equipment choices say about where the industry is heading. European suppliers — the Finnish, Italian and Austrian manufacturers who have dominated the region for three decades — continue to win the large, high-speed contracts. But Chinese machinery is entering the picture. These are not yet the wide-format lines that define the top end of the market, but they are real tissue machines producing real output — and their presence signals that the equipment supply chain for this region is becoming more diverse, and more competitive, than at any point in the last thirty years.

THE OVERCAPACITY QUESTION

The investment picture painted by this survey is impressive by any measure. But it demands an honest reckoning with a risk that is already visible in one part of the region and spreading into others: what happens when capacity grows faster than demand?

Türkiye is not a hypothetical warning — it is a live case study. With 1.4 million tons of installed capacity against domestic consumption of roughly 750,000 tons, a substantial share of the country’s total output must find export markets every year, into corridors that have grown increasingly volatile. Currency movements, freight cost spikes, conflict in neighboring markets and competition from other low-cost producers all threaten the export revenues that justify the investment. The situation in Türkiye is one of clear overcapacity — managed so far through geographic diversification and vertical integration into converting, but not resolved.

The concern is not confined to Türkiye. Across the region, the pipeline of new capacity through 2026 and beyond adds approximately 550,000 tons of annual output against a market forecast to grow at only 1.6% per year in volume terms through 2035. At that rate, demand adds roughly 60,000 to 70,000 tons per year. The supply side adds multiples of that in a single machine startup. There is a well-documented dynamic in capital-intensive industries where executives consistently plan to grow at twice the rate of the underlying market, capacity gets built on optimistic assumptions, and the industry ends up competing for the same pool of demand. Tissue has shown this pattern before. Chinese overcapacity compounds the problem at a global level, with domestic surplus beginning to spill into export markets and effectively capping the prices regional exporters can charge.

The counterargument deserves equal weight. Per-capita consumption across much of the region is still far below its potential. Algeria is growing from 2 to 3 kilograms per person. Iraq is starting from near zero. Sub-Saharan Africa, already served by Egyptian and Tunisian mills, is a vast market that has barely begun to develop. Tissue is among the most resilient paper grades, precisely because demand is non-discretionary and closely correlated with rising household income, while household incomes across much of the region are, structurally, moving in one direction. If demand in these frontier markets develops faster than the conservative headline forecasts suggest — and Algeria’s own 57% export CAGR implies that is possible — the supply additions may be absorbed more comfortably than the arithmetic alone suggests.

The outcome will likely be determined at the company level rather than the market level. Producers with the lowest cost structures, the widest export networks and the deepest vertical integration are best positioned to absorb whatever overcapacity emerges. Those without those advantages face a harder decade. The strategic calculus is not complicated. Historically, the execution is where it becomes more difficult. Those with the lowest cost structures, the widest export networks and the deepest vertical integration will absorb whatever overcapacity emerges.

OUTLOOK

Three decades of data tell a consistent story: this industry builds, pauses occasionally, and then builds again. The machines coming online in 2025 and 2026 are operating at speeds and widths that have been the regional benchmark for a decade. The next leap, if it comes, will be measured not in meters per minute but in where the machines are placed, who runs them, and which markets they are designed to serve. The investments ahead in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq and Qatar, are not a continuation of the same trend so much as a structural shift: the region’s largest import markets are finally building the capacity to supply themselves, while producers in Algeria and Egypt are reaching into European markets that Turkish mills once served largely alone.

Whether that creates a sustained period of oversupply, as has happened in Türkiye, or gets absorbed by demand growth in markets that are still early in their development, probably won’t be clear for several years. Both outcomes are plausible. This industry has built through wars, currency collapses and supply chain failures and kept adding machines. What’s different this time is the scale — and the number of countries doing it simultaneously.

What is not in question is that the tissue industry of the Middle East and North Africa, assembled incrementally, sometimes haphazardly, over thirty years, now carries genuine weight in the global picture. The survey in the following pages is evidence of that. So is the fact that the question many in the industry are now asking is no longer whether the region can produce tissue, but whether it can produce too much.

Data compiled from MET Magazine’s 2026 industry survey.