UK SIC 2007 · 17230
Manufacture of paper stationery (SIC code 17230)
Manufacture of paper stationery is UK SIC code 17230. It sits in division 17 (Manufacture of paper and paper products) of the SIC 2007 list. On the August 2026 Companies House register, 914 active UK companies list 17230 among their SIC codes. 847 of them list it first. That makes it the most used code in its division.
Division 17: Manufacture of paper and paper products
Converting rather than milling. The codes with real numbers here are paper stationery, 17230, paperboard containers, 17219, household and sanitary paper goods, 17220, and the catch-all 17290. Actual pulp and paper mills sit in codes far below the threshold, which reflects an industry where a handful of very large plants make the paper and a long tail of smaller companies turn it into things.
Who prospects SIC 17230 companies
Print finishers, packaging designers, machinery and die suppliers all sell into this division. So do the brands looking for UK packaging production, which has become a more active search since supply chains shortened. Because packaging companies frequently also print, expect overlap with division 18, and match on any SIC position rather than the first if you want the real population. Environmental and recycling compliance services have a natural opening here too.
Lead generation for wholesalers & suppliers →How to read SIC 17230
SIC 17230 is a five-digit code, and the digits are not arbitrary. The first two, 17, are the division, manufacture of paper and paper products. Add the third and you have group 172; the fourth narrows it to a class, and the fifth to the subclass, which is the level Companies House actually asks a company to pick. The whole division sits under section C, manufacturing, the broadest tier there is. Reading a code left to right therefore goes from a whole sector down to one activity.
More on how SIC 17230 is built
A company chooses its own codes when it incorporates and can change them on any confirmation statement. It may list up to four, and Companies House does not check whether they are right. That is why 17230 is worth reading as a claim the company made about itself rather than as a verified fact, and why the first-position and any-position counts above differ.
Measured on the August 2026 register, the busiest registered-office post towns for 17230 are London (141), Birmingham (20), Glasgow (13), Manchester (13) and Leicester (12). Those are registered-office locations, which is where the paperwork sits rather than necessarily where the work happens, so treat them as where to start looking rather than as a service area.
Using SIC 17230 as a filter
914 companies is 0.02 per cent of the 5,190,464 active companies on the UK register, and ranks 17230 most used of the 4 codes we track in division 17. That is the pool before any filter. Whether it is a big market for you depends on what you sell, but it is the number every other filter on this page cuts down from.
More on filtering by SIC 17230
Almost everybody who uses 17230 means it: 847 of 914 companies put it first, leaving only 67 carrying it as a secondary code. That makes it an unusually clean filter. You can match on the code alone and trust that the companies you get really are in this line of work.
These companies are spread out. London is the largest single cluster at 15 per cent and the top five post towns together hold only 22 per cent, so the remaining 78 per cent sits across the rest of the country. A regional filter narrows this list without gutting it, which makes it a reasonable code to work territory by territory.
In practice the code on its own is rarely the whole filter. Pair 17230 with an incorporation date to catch companies in their first months, when they are still choosing suppliers, or with a filing deadline to reach them while the year end is on their mind. A worked example for this code: 17230, registered office in London, incorporated in the last ninety days, which turns a 914 company pool into a list you can write to in an afternoon. Add the poor-website filter if what you sell is a website, or a recent change of officer if you sell to whoever just took the job. Every company you pull carries the Companies House record, the director's name, a verified website and a verified email, and the ones we cannot complete are not charged.
Where SIC 17230 clusters in the UK
ACTIVE COMPANIES BY REGISTERED-OFFICE POST TOWN · COMPANIES HOUSE REGISTER, AUGUST 2026
SIC 17230 companies, as leads
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About SIC 17230
How many UK companies use SIC code 17230?
914 active UK companies list 17230 (Manufacture of paper stationery) among their registered SIC codes. Each company may register up to four. Of those, 847 put it first. The figures come from the August 2026 Companies House register snapshot, and count active companies only.
Should a packaging company use 17219 or a printing code?
If you make the box, 17219 manufacture of paper and paperboard containers is right. If you print onto material someone else made, a division 18 printing code fits better. Many companies genuinely do both and list both. Nobody at Companies House will assess it, so pick the one carrying most of your turnover first.
Why are there so few paper mills on the public record?
Because there are genuinely very few, and the ones that exist are large. Manufacturing paper is capital-intensive and consolidated, whereas converting it is not, so the company count sits almost entirely in the converting codes. Company numbers are a poor guide to industry size in divisions like this one.
Find UK SIC 17230 companies
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