Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Eliukka Kirkela and I'm Head of R&D and Technology at Storins, located in my home country, Finland, nowadays, again. I'll try shortly to describe to you how this sector actually goes. Maybe I should start

from the EU forests. We are utilising about 52 per cent of annual growth of the EU area forest growth and actually about 65 per cent of the growth easily available for, let's say, industrial uses as biomass. So there is room for growth, even

here, old, densely populated Europe. Globally, the situation is a bit more complicated. There are countries like China and India which are strongly dependent on non-wood biomass, straws, reed, etc. And there are countries like

Brazil with a lot of opportunities to increase plantation-based forestry and thus to expand their industrial process. What I try to tell during

coming about 10 minutes is that the sector is renewing fast. We are learning to mimic, in other words, to copy Mother Nature and how she makes processing of things. And I also try to describe to you the role of this 2

million direct-shop opportunities sector for a sector and its related cluster areas here in Europe. Europe has traditionally been the leading continent actually concerning our sector. 20 per cent of production has been exported overseas. And one reason why the sector has been facing so

dramatic changes has been that partly because of the Euro currency and its strength partly because of strategic decisions of countries like China to increase their own capacities, these export opportunities overseas have been gradually disappearing. This has made the strongest or best European

companies also to be much more strongly than earlier present in countries like China, Brazil, etc. Storenzo, I guess many of you

know our company. Concerning our innovation strategy, actually, maybe I should mention the list of our key activities. Printed electronics is an area we invest very much for things like safer homes of the future and partly for intelligence and pharma packaging, etc. It's the micro material

as micro technology where we have been investing for about 20 years actually and also running already commercial scale activities. It's all kind of new bio-based barriers which are very close to our existing packaging or let's say home-building activities. It's forest

biotechnology, how to get forests to grow healthier and it's also future bio-refinery concepts. If you are an engineer you might call them future separation techniques but there are other features in that and then

future wood-building concepts. Future European homes will be more and more built of wood. We have been successfully launching 8 to 12 floor office and flat buildings built out of wood and those solutions seem to be very very

competitive ultimately. Our company has a vision which is very close to the vision of our sector Europe-wide actually and to make long story short we need a new approach concerning materials and particularly bio materials.

This idea has been the cornerstone of our forest sector technology platform which was created six years ago and is right now updated actually and this has been the driver also in our efforts to invest

our time and other resources to this EU initiative called public-private partnership bioeconomy. We work hard to make that happen and we believe that it will be good for Europe. Just to mention a couple of issues related to my

company which however have a wider meaning. 35% of food is globally lost because of lacking or improper packaging before consumption and our dream is to have solutions for that aseptic systems which would be based

on bio materials if needed or in any case recyclable materials and if needed biodegradable materials and that's one strong area where the influence in global economy and the standard of living globally is very very remarkable.

Maybe one more example it looks like biofuels will be needed for aviation for long-haul trucks for boats no matter how good electrical cars etc. we

are able to create. That's one area where our sector has to invest in any case and Europe will need that kind of solutions and concerning let's say holistic use of bio materials it's important to keep in mind that we need

to avoid sub-optimizing. We need to maximize the value we get out from our biomass and maybe this picture gives one view on that topic. I think biofuels should be produced if and when really needed. Lingling materials open

another option no matter if the raw matter is the wood from the forest or if that's some other biomass from bagasse, sugar beets whatever or something from from acro products otherwise. Here a cynical researcher of course says that

okay but we will need one more century of research before we start to understand the chemical structure of lingling. Okay we have challenges but still that avenue must be gone further. Micro and nano materials in general will make many things possible earlier not that possible or at least not that

easy and they will open totally new opportunities to utilize bio-based solutions and let's say functional biochemistry which was earlier touched here already will be making many things from pharma to industrial applications different and easier to be delivered. I happen

to be a researcher by heart but still it's important to keep in mind that no matter if we talk about chemical industries or forest industries or whatever automobile industries and analyze important innovations ultimately

leading to wide commercial applications 60 to 70 percent have the roots at customer interface you might call customer cooperation and that's a real challenge how do we as a sector as companies and as professionals work better closer in real partnership with our customer organizations and

ultimately with the European and global consumer that's a real challenge we face it's no no reason to underestimate the important importance of other partners like partners from the other segments or partners in the value

chain being your suppliers or something like that but 20 30 percent is a typical percentage of important innovation sources or ideas from them and only 10 to 20 percent of important things have the roots at the chambers of the researchers but please keep in your mind that researchers are needed to

make things happen no matter in from which box you look at this big picture that was my attempt to try to tell where this forestry sector actually goes thank you very much