Special Austria

LEADING PLAYER WITH EXTENSIVE ACRES OF FOREST

THE WOOD INDUSTRY EXPORTS A GOOD 70% OF THE TOTAL PRODUCTION

Cemil Celiker (Head of Sales International Admonter Holzindustrie AG)

“We offer wood products for the more demanding side of the market”

One of the leading woodworking companies in Austria is Admonter Holzindustrie AG. This company was founded in 1972 and celebrates its 50th birthday. It started as a sawmill and became a leading enterprise in the production of high-quality natural wood products for holistic room concepts, combining natural wood on floors, walls and ceilings. With a turnover of 69 million euros in 2021 and 280 employees, this is quite an achievement for a company that is owned by… the local Benedictine abbey.

“That abbey illustrates how our history goes a lot further back than 1972. In fact, we have almost 1,000 years of history, as the monastery was founded in 1074”, smiles Cemil Celiker, who is Head of Sales International at Admonter, and who has been working for the company for 17 years already. Cemil Celiker is responsible for the most important markets overseas which are China, Japan, Australia, USA, Canada, Mexico and many more. We ask him first of all to describe Admonter (based in the village of Admont) a little more in depth.

Architects and interior designers

“We provide a variety of wooden products for interior design and decoration. This goes from wood flooring and wood panels, to acoustic products, stair solutions and interior doors, both for the residential and commercial markets. We work a lot with architects and interior designers and can tailor products to their needs.”

“Admonter delivers wood and matching designs and serves as a one-stop, single source place for its customers. We do engineered products, every layer consists of solid wood and that makes us stand out from other companies. Natural wood grown by nature. Same as in nature, our products are built to last a lifetime, it’s the best and most natural material to work with. We use, with the exception of American walnut, only PEFC certified woodspecies from Europe. To which I want to add, we have different techniques (thermo and light smoking) to treat wood and give it further inspiring colours.”

Benelux as interesting growth market

Admonter is very strong on its home markets Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. But how do the figures split up? And what role does the Benelux play in the company’s story?

Cemil Celiker: “Around 30% from our annual turnover is achieved in Austria, the other 70% is separated between the rest of the world. To us, the Benelux is an interesting growth market, in which we mainly focus on Belgium and Luxemburg. We set up a corporation there with a new company (Caro Comfort, coming from the tile business). This was just a few months ago and already now, we see a big demand for high quality products and an increase in the sales numbers, showing that this market has a lot of potential.”

Because this is a special about Austria, we also want to know where Admonter is situated in the entire picture: “In the quality flooring industry we are without a shadow of a doubt top 3. Admonter may not be the biggest in numbers, but for us the most important is to provide our customer the product he actually needs and demands. In the end, to us, customer satisfaction means to make people happy and enjoy their new surroundings for a long time.”

Project business

“Only the best and most suitable items will find their way into prescriptions. Our main target is mid and high end business, in which we can boast several prestigious projects, such as five star hotels, top restaurants, offices, shopping malls, condominium projects,… Some examples? You find us in the 5 star Park Hyatt in Washington DC, the Grand Hyatt in Dubai, the Berchtesgarden Kempinski, the 91 Hannam Project in Seoul, and so on.”

Multibond and Heritage Collection

In conclusion, we want to know what the future has in stall for Admonter. And are they working on astounding new products? Cemil Celiker: “This year we launched two interesting products of which Multibond with its striped look stands out. It has quite some advantages to what is available on the market, such as faster installation and less weight. Also this year, we extended our range of colours within our well-known wood species ash, spruce, larch and pine and created a new collection with these, the so-called ‘Heritage Collection’. We added interesting textures to this collection: deep or rough brushing and different colours, all in all more than 24 different options.”

www.admonter.com

This article takes us to a landlocked European state, since Austria has no coast. It has 2562 kilometres of borders and adjoins eight countries: Germany (784km), Italy (430km), Hungary (366km), Czech Republic (362km), Slovenia (330km), Switzerland (164km), Slovakia (91km), and Liechtenstein (35km).

Austria is located in the Alps and has a surface area of 83,871km², only 32% of which is below 500 metres high. Most of its people speak German, which is also the country’s official language. Politically, Austria is a federal parliamentary republic with nine states. The head of state is the federal president and the federal chancellor acts as head of government. Austria is a member of the EU, the UN, and several other international organisations. Its most typical feature is that the Alps extend over a large part of its territory (three quarters of the country belongs to this mountain area). Obviously, what interests us most is the economy. We note that forestry, cattle farming, and dairy production yield considerable incomes and these activities are found mainly in the alpine provinces. The old textile industry in Vorarlberg is worthy of note on the periphery. It’s no surprise that half of all industries are located around the basin of Vienna (the capital city and by far Austria’s biggest city). The cities of Linz, Steyr, Graz, Leoben, Innsbruck, and Salzburg also form major industrial centres.

Wood industry

Economically, forestry is quite important for Austria. You could hardly expect anything else when you realise that about four million hectares of the total surface area consist of forest area. That is just under half (48%) of the nation’s total surface area. With just under 28,000 people working in the wood industry, this underlines the importance of this economical branch.

Room concepts made of natural wood for floors, walls & ceilings

FN NEUHOFER

The family business FN Neuhofer has been processing wood for 372 years. Today, as a recognised supplier of skirtings and accessories for floors, walls and ceilings, it is among the international leaders in the industry and serves customers in 70 countries around the world (export rate 96 %). The FN Neuhofer brand combines innovative products with state-of-the-art technologies, quality, reliability, the best service and the fastest delivery times. The turnover in 2021 was 86 Million Euro, 250 employees work in the company. FN Neuhofer is a worldwide full service supplier for - skirtings and flooring profiles - fastening systems for skirtings and flooring profiles - accessories for floors, walls and ceilings This gives FN Neuhofer's customers the opportunity to obtain "everything from a single source", thus saving time, complexity and costs. The production halls are filled with the latest high-tech machines. These will ensure that FN Neuhofer can continue to delight its customers with products of absolute top quality and maximum efficiency in the future and thus continue to grow successfully together with them. For more information on the company and its products, please visit www.fnprofile.com +43 (0) 6234 8500-110 - schoenc@fnprofile.com - www.fnprofile.com

Equally unsurprising is that the 1,266 companies in the Austrian wood industry (including saw mills, figure from 2020) mainly export products and do so mainly within the European Union (77% in 2020, for a total value of 4,321 billion euros. The rest of Europe comes a distant second with 12%, a total value of 670 million euros). In 2020, no less than 70% of wood products were exported (production value of the woodwork industry two years ago: 8.03 billion euros), with a noticeable role for solid wood panels. In that same year, the total export volume of that was exactly 176.88 million euros.

What we particularly want to know is how well Austria scores in terms of wooden floors. Here we note that wooden floors are not far behind wooden panels. With a product group which was good for 236 million euros in 2020, the southern neighbour of Germany certainly holds its own. However, the lion’s share of the wood is used for furniture (1,077.2 million euros), softwood (1,162.2 million euros), and industrial parquet (500.8 million euros). Other export figures from 2020 in millions of euros: windows (81.5) and doors (45.4). Major companies in the wood industry

What are the major companies in the wood industry, classified according to their net turnover? It will equally come as no surprise to hear that the list (again from 2020) yields a few familiar names. The absolute leader is Egger Holzwerkstoffe GmbH, with a net turnover of 2,831.50 million euros. In second place we find Binder Beteiligungs AG (brand name: Binderholz) with 1,603 million euros and Umdasch Group AG (1,411.44 million euros) completes the first three.

Other big names include: Doka GmbH (1,174.20), Stora Enso Wood Products GmbH (850.00), Pfeifer Holding GmbH (667.70), MayrMelnhof Holz Holding AG (627.51), Hasslacher Holding GmbH (430.40), FunderMax GmbH (396.00), Kaindl M. (395.00), Wintersteiger AG (182 Mio. EUR (Overall turnover), and FN Neuhofer (74.000.000 Euro).

Sources: Wikipedia, 2020/2021 industry report by the Austrian Wood Industry Professional Association, and Trend Top 500.