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Essity AB (publ)
Essity makes and sells hygiene and health products—things like toilet paper, paper towels, diapers, and wound care—to consumers, businesses, and hospitals.
Essity is a hygiene and health company. It makes the everyday products people use in bathrooms, kitchens, nurseries, and hospitals—toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, baby diapers, adult incontinence products, and wound care—and sells them to ordinary shoppers, to businesses like hotels and restaurants, and to healthcare customers. You probably know it through brands rather than the corporate name: Tork in offices and public restrooms, Libresse and Bodyform for period products, TENA for incontinence care, and Lotus and Velvet for household tissue in parts of Europe.
The business splits into three broad areas. The biggest historically has been consumer tissue—the rolls and boxes you buy at the supermarket. Personal care covers baby diapers, feminine care, and incontinence products sold both in stores and through healthcare channels. Professional hygiene, sold mainly under the Tork brand, supplies dispensers, soap, paper towels, and napkins to offices and public venues. The appeal to customers is mostly practical: these are repeat purchases, and once a hotel installs Tork dispensers or a hospital standardizes on TENA, switching is a hassle. That creates steady, sticky demand. Essity was spun out of the forest products group SCA in 2017 and listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, with headquarters in Stockholm. It still makes much of its own tissue paper from wood pulp, so energy and pulp costs swing its profits, and it has spent recent years raising prices and cutting costs to protect margins after inflation hit. It pays a dividend and has run share buybacks; a notable move came in 2023, when it sold its entire stake in the Asian diaper maker Vinda to Isola Castle — actually to a bidder backed by Asia Symbol — for roughly €1.6 billion, a deal partly tied to a drawn-out ownership fight with its Chinese partner. That cash went toward debt reduction and buybacks.
Competitors are large and familiar: Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Sofidel in tissue and personal care, plus regional players. Essity's edge is brand strength in niche categories like incontinence care, where TENA leads globally, and the boring reliability of its products—people keep buying them in good times and bad. The weak spot is that tissue is a commodity business with thin differentiation, so price wars and private-label competition can squeeze it.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026