The suits at Smurfit head office out in Beech Hill must have been pinching themselves with the reaction in Britain to last week's results and the positive comments from Garry McGann in Dublin and Dermot Smurfit in London on current trading and the outlook for packaging industry.
Smurfit is not accustomed to getting a good press from the British financial media and believes that it has never been given the appreciation it deserves from the London market. It isn't all that long ago that the Financial Times Lex comment column sniffily described Smurfit's complex multibillion remortgage of its US operations as little more than financial engineering.
Well, times have certainly changed and Smurfit's emergence as the high priest of prudent management of supply and demand in its key US business certainly went down well with Lex. And Smurfit's determination not to milk the upswing of the current cycle in the packaging industry by not pressing for another increase in board prices has merely added further gleam to Smurfit's halo.
Now Lex believes that last week's results are the last of the bad news, while the Daily Telegraph (another organ which previously somehow failed to notice the attractions of Smurfit) nails its colours to the mast with a "Smurfit packs in value" headline to its comment column. The London Independent voiced similar sentiments and all three British dailies put Smurfit on their "buy" lists.
Brokers were equally enthusiastic with Salomon Smith Barney and Warburg Dillon Read rushing out with enthusiastic "buy" notes, with Salomon setting a 12-month price target of €3.30 (£2.60) for the shares. Given that Smurfit is trading on a hefty discount to the US sector - reflecting US investors' discomfort with the slower pace of recovery in European operations - those sort of share-price targets may be conservative.
If Smurfit manages to instil some discipline into the rest of the notoriously ill-disciplined US board industry, by getting the industry to better match supply with demand, then the last few dreadful years which has seen Smurfit sink from Dublin market kingpin to an also-ran should be at an end.
