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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. 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 850 employees and a turnover of approximately SEK 2.8 billion. The company also has a chain of 33 builders’ merchants located throughout Sweden. In addition, it has also been involved in sawmill production in the Baltic States since the 1990s.
134 Industry Europe
Today the Karl Hedin Group operates five specialist packaging plants in central Sweden with its main focus on the production 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.
Know-how and the latest 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 extensive experience in the forestry sector and its knowledge stretches back many generations. The company’s strength lies in its ability to combine old forestry knowledge and principles with new knowledge and technology. In addition, Karl Hedin has its own team of designers and it plans to strengthen these further as well as its
sales organisation with more design competence and drawing capacity. The company also offers its customers a range of IT connections for more efficient ordering and invoicing. The company produces a wide range of timber products and by-products. This includes roof trusses, which are produced at its Rattvik factory where a number of standard designs are produced although specially designed roof trusses can also be made to order at the plant. Construction timber plays a big part in the company’s product portfolio with joists of varying sizes as well as tongue and groove products being manufactured, all of which are planed by AB Karl Hedin. The company’s impregnated assortment includes a large number of decking boards, and all these products are pressure-treated with a solution that does not contain either the traditional harmful chrome or arsenic constituents. Internal and external panelling is another product that is manufactured by Karl Hedin,
