Stora Enso Oyj - Company Announcement

Stora Enso CEO Jouko Karvinen's message to shareholders at the Company's AGM

STORA ENSO OYJ STOCK EXCHANGE RELEASE 1 April 2009 at 13.25 GMT                 

“Stora Enso faced high cost inflation, especially in wood and energy costs,     
throughout the whole of 2008. The markets were firm during the first half, but  
towards the end of the year they started to deteriorate rapidly. We took swift  
action, curtailing paper and board production by 15% already in the fourth      
quarter. We have since stepped up the curtailments to an estimated about 20% in 
the first quarter of 2009 to safeguard our operating cash flow,” said CEO Jouko 
Karvinen.                                                                       

“We continue to take a proactive approach to the challenges we are facing. We   
divested our North American operations and our merchant business Papyrus, which 
enabled us to reduce our short-term debt and strengthen our balance sheet       
considerably. We have made Stora Enso's Finnish assets strategically independent
of Russian wood and undertaken two permanent capacity reduction programmes. We  
have also done our utmost to support the employees and communities affected by  
restructuring, and believe we have a good track record of finding new business  
creating new employment at former paper or board production sites. The latest   
success was the sale of our Summa mill site in Finland to Google for about EUR  
40 million in February.                                                         

“The paper industry is now in a critical situation, especially in Finland. Our  
variable costs have escalated - even faster than we have been able to cut our   
fixed costs through the aggressive programmes. The reasons are many - from the  
impact of the Russian duty threats to energy taxation. Now, with the dramatic   
downturn of the markets, the issue is so big we believe that nobody can solve   
this issue alone. We now need to find new operating models and flexibility in   
all fields - we either argue forever how we split a shrinking cake, or we work  
together to start making it bigger again and sharing it.                        

“In this situation of dramatically reduced demand, Stora Enso is guiding        
customer orders irrespective of the country and also within a country to the    
lowest-cost mills and machines to safeguard cash flow - and critical customer   
volumes. In sawmilling and some paper grades, this has meant keeping our mills  
in Sweden, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Russia in production whilst taking   
downtime in Finland and Germany.                                                

“Pricing and cash preservation will remain top priorities for Stora Enso in     
2009. Earlier this year, we said we would reduce capital expenditure from EUR   
700 million in 2008 to EUR 400 million. Also, the temporary lay-offs and other  
cost improvement measures must continue.                                        

“We have to restore the Company's profitability and that means we have to       
continue with decisive actions. We will not just wait for better times to come, 
we will continue ourselves to take responsibility for our future in the         
prevailing tough business environment. We must find a solution - and when I say 
here “we”, I mean everyone with a stake in the industry.”                       

For further information, please contact:                                        
Ulla Paajanen-Sainio, VP, Investor Relations and Financial Communications, tel. 
+358 2046 21242                                                                 

www.storaenso.com                                                               
www.storaenso.com/investors                                                     


Stora Enso is a global paper, packaging and forest products company producing   
newsprint and book paper, magazine paper, fine paper, consumer board, industrial
packaging and wood products. The Group has 32 000 employees and 85 production   
facilities in more than 35 countries worldwide, and is a publicly traded company
listed in Helsinki and Stockholm. Our annual production capacity is 12.7 million
tonnes of paper and board, 1.5 billion square metres of corrugated packaging and
6.9 million cubic metres of sawn wood products, including 3.2 million cubic     
metres of value-added products. Our sales in 2008 were EUR 11.0 billion.        



STORA ENSO OYJ                                                                  


Jari Suvanto		Ulla Paajanen-Sainio