Explosive growth of ecommerce has alerted investors to unglamorous business of cardboard boxes.

The packaging industry will never quicken pulses, but the pandemic has wrought an improbable transformation in the status of its best-known product: the lowly cardboard box.

With lockdowns forcing millions to turn online for almost everything over the past 18 months, the daily arrival of packages has supplied many with a rare frisson of excitement in a world robbed of shops, restaurants, cinemas and travel. The unlikely outcome has also brightened the fortunes of the $350bn paper-based packaging industry at the heart of the ecommerce economy. The volume of cardboard used to deliver goods from retailers to households last year surged almost 40 per cent, according to consultancy Smithers.