Consolidation has been the name of the game in the Nordic countries in recent months.
Mergers, acquisitions and investments in new facilities at home and abroad have featured strongly as everyone jockeys to find their position in the timber and wood products chain.
Russia and the Baltic states have been prime targets for investment, with Nordic countries seeking to focus on volume-intensive growth products for global markets.
Stora Enso has been particularly active. It was due to open the most modern component factory in the world in Sweden at the end of September, as this issue went to press. It represents part of a €17m investment in a sawmill and component factory over three years.
Stora Enso Timber opened its first sawmill in Russia in August, with a second scheduled to begin operations later this year, and also invested €50m in a sawmill in Latvia as part of its new Baltic Production Group. Other investments are planned in Lithuania and Estonia.
UPM-Kymmene‘s Wood Products Industry division is also building a sawmill in Russia at a cost of €35m which is due to be inaugurated in January 2004.
Other UPM-Kymmene investments include the purchase of the holdings of AS Forestex and Stora Enso Timber AS in the Estonian birch plywood mill AS FSS Plywood. The company also established UPM-Kymmene Forest AS in the Baltic states.
Sweden’s first and Europe’s fourth largest timber company was created as a result of a merger between the sawmilling and timber processing units of Sveaskog and Mellanskog. Called Royal Star, the company will have annual sales of SKr5bn.
On the production front, sawn and planed softwood in Finland and Sweden rose in the period January-July – but Norway saw a 1% drop.
Wood Focus, the Nordic Wood Products Review, reports that Finnish production was approximately 7.6 million m3 – 2% above the equivalent figure for last year. From January-May 2003 Finnish exports of sawn and planed softwood totalled around 3.6 million m3, 1% above last year’s figure.
In Sweden, production of sawn and planed softwood during the first half was about 9.8 million m3, 4% more than the same period last year.
Swedish exports of sawn and planed softwood totalled around 4.7 million m3 in January-May 2003 – 6% below last year’s figure.
Norwegian production of sawn and planed softwood was about 1.2 million m3 – 1% below the equivalent figure for last year.
However, Norwegian exports of sawn and planed softwood totalled approximately 251,700m3 in January-July 2003 – 2% more than in the same period last year.
The UK remains the biggest overall export market for Finland and Sweden, and comes second to the Netherlands for Norway.
Norwegian exports to the UK amounted to 38,800m3 compared with 44,800m3 to the Netherlands. Finland’s total exports to the UK amounted to 715,800m3 and Sweden’s a mammoth 1.12 billion m3.
