USA: New Online Marketplace to Trade Recovered Paper
German-based technology provider Voith has joined forces with the Boston Consulting Group Digital Ventures – a subsidiary of the Boston Consulting Group – to establish a digital marketplace for paper industry. The joint venture has been named “merQbiz” after Mercury, the Roman god of trade.
The new company has its headquarters in Manhattan Beach, California. The first product solution from merQbiz is a digital trading platform for recovered paper in the US, initially aimed at market participants of the North American paper industry. According to Voith, the North American recovered paper market has so far been characterized by strong fragmentation, with many different market participants, inconsistent supply and logistics chains, low levels of price transparency and fluctuating product qualities. The new online platform merQbiz is aiming to improve the way buyers and sellers of recovered paper do business. “Traders and buyers from pulp and paper mills, paper brokers and recycling companies can directly network with one another in the future and receive all the relevant information on supply and demand,” the provider assures. “They can also conduct their buying and selling transactions securely on the trading platform. Like many well-known online marketplaces, merQbiz can take over the evaluation of the sellers and buyers and the quality of the merchandise. This ensures enhanced transactional transparency, professional processing and a high level of security for all goods, logistics and payment flows.” For Voith, merQbiz is another major step in becoming one of the significant players of the digital industry. The technology group plans to invest about 50 million Euro in the setup of the venture by the end of fiscal 2020.
Photo: O. Kürth
GR 22017
