Background Description

Stora Enso’s businesses in Guangxi include forest plantation harvesting and management and the Beihai packaging board mill which is the largest foreign-invested project in Guangxi as well as one of the important investments in Stora Enso’s strategic transformation.

Currently the total investment of the Beihai mill is 800 million euros. The board machine has an annual capacity of 450,000 tonnes. The mill has a high focus on product quality/safety and employs state-of-the-art environmental equipment and advanced technologies, and mainly produces top-grade board products targeting the food service, electronic, confectionary and perfumery markets.

The Stora Enso Guangxi forestry operations in Guangxi commenced in 2002. At present, the leased area is 82,590 hectares with 70,000 hectares of eucalyptus plantation. All the plantations have continuously been certified to Forest Stewardship Council® and Chinese CFCCTM certification schemes since 2012 and have been continuously providing renewable raw materials to the Stora Enso Beihai mill since 2016.

The forestry organization is structured along functional lines, consisting of operational departments including Wood Supply, Sales & Marketing, Land Management, Silviculture, Research & Development and Government Affairs etc. The total employee number is around 600.

We are currently looking for new experienced and talented professionals to join our Stora Enso Guangxi Forestry organization:

Reporting line

Report to Head of Operations, Stora Enso Guangxi Forestry

Work location

Beihai Tieshangang office, Guangxi, China and requiring regular travel to operational work-sites within southern Guangxi

Job description of Head of R&D

• Lead, manage and develop Stora Enso Guangxi Forestry’s R&D

  • Major areas of R&D responsibility will be in the following areas:

    • Breeding

    • Silviculture practices

    • Pest and disease control

    • Tissue culture and nursery practices

to support and continuously improve Silvicultural operations and maximise the productivity and value of the plantation estate

• Breeding: SEGX initiated a state-of-the-art breeding program in partnership with Plant Plan Genetics (an Australian consultancy) in 2016. The breeding program employs modern breeding strategies, advanced trial design and data analyses. The program involves hybridization between several species, and ca 10.000 seedlings from CP crossings enters the program annually. There is a need to further optimize the different steps in the program, ;i.e grafting, crossing, measurements, data handling etc. A long-term target is to introduce molecular selection tools to increase speed and precision of breeding.

• Silviculture practices: SEGX has recently entered a collaboration with Fractal Forest (South African consultancy) to introduce site specific silviculture management on the estate. A major task will be to improve current practices of e.g fertilization, spacing, weeding, clone deployment according to the production potential of sites (e.g. soils, climate, topography).

• Pest and disease control: Pest and disease is becoming an increasing problem at SEGX, and its control have the highest priority. Immediate issues will be to improve SEGX Forestry Pest & Disease strategy, including monitoring and control systems. Together with chosen consultancy SEGX also wish to develop a test bed for selecting disease resistant clones.

• Tissue culture and nursery practices: SEGX propagate their clonal material using tissue culture and runs a nursery with a capacity of ca 15 M seedlings per year. R&D work is needed for clone adapted TC propagation and for optimizing growth conditions in nursery in order to produce vital seedlings for planting.

• Work in close cooperation with the Silvicultural Department, including field operations, production nursery and production tissue culture), as well as with technical matter experts including HQ staff and consultants

• Improve and maintain the R&D trial database to world’s best practice

• Responsible for R&D budget and resource planning

• Train and develop the R&D team competencies

• Maintain and further develop collaborations with academy, institutes, forest farms and consultants in R&D issues as necessary

Qualification requirement:

• More than 10 years working experience in forestry operations and/or operational forest R&D.

• A solid knowledge and expertise in tree breeding (eucalypt tree breeding preferred), experimental design and data analysis and a good understanding of abiotic and biotic impact on tree growth and productivity

• Bachelor, MSc or doctor degree education in forestry or agriculture

• Good leadership, capability to motivate and to develop the team’s competencies and professionalism.

• Analytical mindset and ability to drive for improvement and change

• Ability to network and collaborate well with the internal organization as well as external stakeholders

• Ability to drive development and implementation of systematic processes

• Customer focused. Listen and meet with the needs of operations as well as senior executives

• Proactive individual with a positive and resilient personality.

• Proven ability to adapt to challenging environments.

• Human focus with great cross-cultural awareness

• Performance oriented and ability to always deliver against set targets and deadlines

• Strong communication skills in English both verbally and written (some Mandarin is preferred

待遇面议

上班地址：广西北海市铁山港区兴港镇港中路188号