My memory of the early 2010s is different. I remember Pesonen saying directly that newsprint machines would not be converted or renewed, but rather run to their end, and the resulting cash flow would be used to develop new businesses. UPM thus made a different strategic choice than SE and MG.
At that time, the largest ongoing projects were the refining of biofuels in Lappeenranta as a completely new business, and the expansion/diversification of pulp production in the Uruguay project. In addition, Pesonen strongly emphasized UPM’s transformation from a bulk paper producer to a high-tech company. Previously, UPM registered only a few patents a year; in the early 2010s, the number rose, I don’t remember exactly, perhaps 20-fold?
Hindsight is, of course, always the best wisdom, and it is clear that innovations in the forest sector will largely continue to depend on political guidance – that is, in practice, whether producers of replaceable products (such as traditional cotton producers in the case of wood-based textile fibers) have to pay for the negative external effects they cause, or not. Politicians often decide for political reasons that they do not have to. In such cases, high-tech solutions from the forest industry cannot compete economically. This has also happened to a very large proportion of forest industry innovations since the early 2010s.
I don’t know which year in the early 2010s was referred to here, but in my memory, Pesonen’s view on the future of printing papers was no more optimistic than others’. Surely many expected some kind of recovery, but the depth and permanence of the decline came as a surprise.
On the other hand, at the societal level, we expected until about 2020 that the economy would soon enter strong growth after the 2008 crisis, as had always happened before. Now a huge number of people have appeared who, of course, immediately saw that economic growth like before was never going to happen. Hindsight is always easiest.