ADDING VALUE TO FORESTRY RAW MATERIALS K
arl Hedin is a family-owned business and one of Scandinavia’s largest sawmill operators and specialist wood packaging companies. The diverse forestry trading group has manufacturing facilities in Sweden and Estonia. Its raw material division supplies its Swedish sawmills with timber and the sawmills subsequently supply the packaging factories and planing mills with sawn timber. In turn, the company’s planing mills supply builders’ merchants with construction, impregnated and primed timber products. 158 Industry Europe
The Karl Hedin Group was founded at the beginning of the 1900s and has grown to become one of Sweden’s largest and most respected forestry products companies with over 750 employees and a turnover of more than SEK 2.4 billion. The company also has a chain of 27 builders’ merchants located throughout Sweden. In addition, it has also been involved in sawmill production in the Baltic States since the 1990s. Today the Karl Hedin Group operates five specialist packaging plants in central Sweden with its main focus on the produc-
Karl Hedin is a Nordic leader in the manufacture of specialist wood packaging and forestry products. Philip Yorke looks at how the company adds value to the timber it processes at its five modern saw and planing mills in Sweden and Estonia, and how it utilises the latest technology to improve productivity and efficiency for its customers. tion of pallets for the forestry industry. The company also supplies pallets and boxes for the steel and manufacturing industries, where it has the capacity to produce both large and heavy packaging items.
Combining in-depth experience with modern technology Karl Hedin has always strived to get as much value as possible out of the timber that it processes, which is one of the reasons why forest owners stay so loyal to the company. Over the years Karl Hedin has accumulated
