Rayonier Advanced Materials Inc 's

Cellulose Specialties
Significant intellectual property, capital investment and technical expertise are needed to design and manufacture customized cellulose specialties fibers to exacting customer specifications. The product must be formulated to achieve the desired characteristics including parameters for purity, viscosity, brightness, reactivity and other physical properties. Product qualification time can be lengthy, extending six to twenty-four months. Resulting customer relationships are typically long-term, based on an understanding of our customers’ production processes and technical expertise which we utilize to solve customers’ production issues and support new product development. Further, establishing a production line and obtaining the necessary production technologies requires substantial capital and ongoing maintenance expenditures.
Product performance, technical service and price are principal methods of competition in cellulose specialties. Product performance is primarily determined by the purity and uniformity of the cellulose specialties. Our intellectual property, technical expertise and experience provide the basis by which we are able to uniformly produce high-value cellulose specialties. Additionally, we are able to produce high-value, uniform cellulose specialties through our diverse proprietary manufacturing processes.
We compete with both domestic and foreign producers in cellulose specialties. Competitors include GP Cellulose (formerly known as Buckeye Technologies), Borregaard, Bracell, Tembec Sappi, Nippon, Cosmo Specialty Fibers and Aditya Birla Group. Some competitors use both wood and cotton linter fibers, as a source of cellulose fibers.

Commodity Products
The principal method of competition in commodity products is price, as purity and uniformity are less critical differentiators. We compete with both domestic and foreign producers of commodity products.
For commodity viscose, there are many competitors that derive their commodity viscose from either wood or cotton. Although cellulose specialties can generally be sold to meet commodity viscose demand, the reverse is not typically true.
For absorbent materials, major competitors include GP Cellulose, Domtar and International Paper.