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The EIB signed a EUR 400 million, seven-year loan with Essity on 29 January 2026 (EIB project ref. 20210374, "Essity Health and Hygiene Products RDI"). The financing covers RDI expenditure at Essity's research centres in Sweden (the primary location), Germany and France between 2025 and 2028, targeting product and manufacturing-process innovation in Personal Care, Professional Hygiene and medical wound care. Stated priorities include substituting fossil-based plastics with bio-based materials, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and waste, and expanding digital solutions in product design and manufacturing. The EIB notes a strong gender-equality dimension: roughly 30% of total RDI spend is dedicated to feminine care, including menstrual protection and incontinence-product research. Essity is a recurring EIB borrower — the bank previously financed RDI programmes for the company that concluded in 2016 and 2024, making this the third generation of the same financing relationship. The EIB frames the deal as supporting EU priorities to strengthen strategic industries and decarbonise production. Global Trade Alert logs the transaction as a "red" state-linked lending-support intervention (state act 96020 / intervention 151945), consistent with its treatment of the numerous other EIB corporate RDI and risk-sharing loans already in this register.
relationships with large EU industrial groups (third tranche to Essity since prior programmes closed in 2016 and 2024).
conditions attached to EIB innovation lending in the consumer-products space, alongside the bank's parallel wind-supply-chain and battery financing lines already filed in this register.
channel GTA identifies is the EIB's below-market lending capacity extended to a named commercial group (Essity) rather than allocated through open competitive tender.
interest-rate terms or subsidy-equivalent value of the loan relative to market financing.
R&D sites is not disclosed.