Ari Martonen, president and chief executive of mechanical wood giant Finnforest, has met all 750 of the company’s UK personnel as part of a corporate restructuring and rebranding strategy.
Mr Martonen made a whistle-stop three-day trip around the country last week to explain the rationale of the decision to apply the Finnforest banner across the com-pany’s mechanical wood operations and their products (it previously had around 40 brands). He also gave details of the company’s international development plans.
The trip started at Finnforest’s Grangemouth machining mill and Leven pole plant. Mr Martonen, Finnforest UK managing director John Tong and other members of the company’s British and Finnish management team then flew down to the mill in Boston, and finally to the Tilbury importing and distribution operation.
‘It was a very valuable exercise and the first time such a senior figure from Finnforest in Finland has met all the UK workforce,’ said Mr Tong. ‘The presentations and question and answer sessions were timed to fit in with our staff’s schedule. At Boston that meant talking to the night shift at midnight!’
Mr Martonen is taking his roadshow across Europe, but started in the UK because of the size of Finnforest’s business here.
‘It represents a quarter of our sales, a quarter of our workforce and around a third of our assets,’ he said.
Finnforest recently undertook a personnel survey to define its five core values. These, Mr Martonen told the UK workforce, are the ability to achieve results, job satisfaction, teamwork, courage and ecology.
He also discussed Finnforest’s plans to develop its Building Systems operation to offer a family of products, with a new I-beam plant coming on stream shortly in Germany and glulam set to be added this year.
Mr Martonen said that the company’s overall ambition was to grow from ‘fourth or fifth in the market’ to Europe’s leading mechanical wood business in the next few years.
‘We can achieve this partly through organic growth, but are also, of course, looking at acquisition and possible mergers. We expect to make announcements on half a dozen acquisitions very soon.’
