ATGLEN, Pa. (From news reports) -- When a recruiter approached Andy Silvernail about joining International Paper to turn around the 127-year-old company, he initially said no.

Silvernail grew up in the shadows of a paper mill in Bucksport, Maine, that produced the paper on which Time magazine was printed. The mill closed in 2014, devastating his hometown. Silvernail told the recruiter that he didn't want to lead a declining commodity business that could only win as the cheapest producer.

"Andy," the recruiter said, "you're wrong. It is not a paper business. It's a packaging business, and it's misunderstood."

Silvernail, who had retired at 50 after a lucrative run as chief executive of IDEX, an industrial conglomerate, was dabbling in private equity at KKR and looking for a business that needed to be transformed in a big way. Now 54, he said he wouldn't have taken the top job at International Paper if he thought it would be easy.

"There's some possibility that you're not going to succeed," he said in an interview. "I like that."

His first year on the job seemed promising. Wall Street cheered his plan to narrow the company's focus to corrugated-cardboard packaging, hire more salespeople, close money-losing mills and revamp its network of box plants.

International Paper's shares surged more than 70% from when his hire was announced in March 2024 through late January.

Silvernail got his first taste of trouble when President Trump's tariff plans stoked fears that economic activity could tank. International Paper doesn't sell many boxes across borders, yet its shares tumbled.

Cardboard boxes have become a reliable economic indicator. The better the economy, the more corrugated packaging is consumed--not just for Amazon.com deliveries, but to move everything from factory parts to fruits and vegetables around the country.

"If we see meaningful weakness from here, it's going to stretch us," Silvernail told investors last month. "There's no doubt about it." International Paper had just reported disappointing quarterly results and the Commerce Department had said that U.S. gross domestic product contracted in the first quarter.

Nonetheless, Silvernail left intact a forecast for North American profit to double by 2027.

If Silvernail's targets are hit, the shares could double, said Philip Ng, an analyst at Jefferies, which made the stock one of its top picks.

"He's shown great urgency and taken decisive actions," Ng said.

Others said too much must go right for the company to meet his goals.

Besides turning around an old-economy behemoth with tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of factories, International Paper is also folding in DS Smith, a European company it acquired in January for $7.2 billion. And it is selling its volatile fluff-pulp business, which makes absorbent material for diapers. Meanwhile, the trade war has the box industry tearing up growth forecasts.

"There's a lot of balls in the air," said Jay Cushing, an analyst with the bond-research firm Gimme Credit. "Is it possible they can deliver on all those things at the same time? Yeah, but it just feels like a big lift."

International Paper was founded in 1898, when 17 pulp and paper mills in the Northeast combined. It branched from newsprint into other types of paper and corrugated packaging--invented in England in the 1850s to maintain the shape of the era's tall hats--and became one of the most durable brands in American business.

By 2021, International Paper had spun off the last of its paper businesses to focus on boxes. It was still acting like a paper company, though.

Eager to ensure that enough volume moved through its box plants to keep its mills running, it locked in yearslong deals with national accounts at cheap rates, Ng said.

When demand surged during the pandemic e-commerce boom, the company ran into operational problems, exacerbated by years of deferred maintenance. It had to satisfy low-margin contracts at the expense of more profitable regional and local customers, including farmers, meatpackers and manufacturers.

Its profit margins and shares slumped. Investors wondered how the company would pay its dividend after shedding its pulp business in Siberia, which was a cash cow.

Silvernail, who was a linebacker at Dartmouth College, has a style that is more like that of a ball coach than a bean counter. He earned a reputation as a management whiz when he rose through the ranks at Danaher, a conglomerate. He preaches an 80/20 philosophy: focusing on a small number of customers that account for the bulk of business and allocating resources accordingly.

His youth in Maine revolved around the mill. His friends' fathers worked there. His future wife interned in the mill's human-resources office, working for his football coach's wife. His father-in-law was a millwright who retired soon after International Paper bought the mill in 2000.

Silvernail's office in Memphis, Tenn., is decorated with a photo of the mill given to him by a childhood friend who went to work for International Paper after high school. The jobs of his friend and nearly 700 others were eliminated a week later when Silvernail decided to close a Campti, La., mill that was losing money.

"That's a brutal decision," Silvernail said. "Except economically. If it can't stand on its own, it has to be a decision you make."

The savings will be invested into other mills and put toward building new box plants and hiring salespeople, he said.

Silvernail wants salespeople in the back of delivery trucks talking to drivers and meeting with clients, with designers in tow, to come up with custom packaging. The idea is for International Paper to make what it can sell, not to try to sell what it makes, as it had been doing.

Silvernail said he wants International Paper to operate more like its recent acquisition, DS Smith. The European company is known for making corrugated packaging that is as good at protecting merchandise in transit as on supermarket shelves.

DS Smith adds about one million box designs to International Paper's library of roughly two million. One DS Smith design that Silvernail admires is a display-ready carton for a confectioner. It is fitted with an elastic strap to keep chocolate bars pushed to the front and visible to customers. Sales of the candy rose once the design was deployed, Silvernail said.

The focus on finished boxes has the company investing heavily in its box plants. It broke ground this month on a $260 million plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where it will crank out patented leak-resistant boxes for the region's slaughterhouses.

It will be twice as large as its newest plant, which opened in 2023 in Atglen, Pa. That highly automated facility corrugates, glues and slices huge rolls of brown paper that arrive by rail from the company's containerboard mills in the South, which pulp loblolly pine trees or recycled boxes. Boxes come off the line at the plant in southeastern Pennsylvania at a rate of hundreds a minute.

Many are basic shipping boxes for e-commerce companies. The mushroom growers of Chester County, Pa., who produce more than half of the U.S. crop, are also big clients. Mushroom farmers are the type of regional, high-margin customers that make up about one-third of International Paper's business but were let down when it couldn't make boxes fast enough, Silvernail said.

"We're not spiking the football yet," he said. "We were losing market share, and we're now holding our own."