Stora Enso Oyj is a Finnish and Swedish company. It develops and produces solutions based on wood and biomass for a range of industries and applications worldwide. It has headquarters in Helsinki, Finl and Stockholm, Sweden. The majority of sales takes place in Europe, but there are also significant operations in Asia and South America. Stora Enso was formed in 1998, when the Swedish mining and forestry products company Stora AB merged with the Finnish forestry products company Enso Oyj. In 2021, the average number of employees was over 23,000. In 2015, Stora Enso was ranked seventh in the world by sales and fourth by earnings, among forest, paper and packaging industry companies. For the first two quarters of 2018, the company was ranked second by net earnings among European forest and paper industry companies. The corporate history can be traced back to the oldest known preserved share certificate in the world, issued in 1288. Based on this, some observers consider Stora Enso to be the oldest limited liability company in the world.