Sveaskog sells pulpwood to Billerud

This is Billerud's solution to the dilemma that arose when the forest owners' association Norra Skog stopped selling pulpwood to Billerud and instead sold it to the Finnish forest owners' movement Metsä Group, which has built a large mill for paper pulp and biofuels in Kemi in Finland, a few miles from Haparanda. For Karlsborg, this meant losing 15 percent of its raw material.

But now the state-owned Sveaskog is doing the opposite, reducing deliveries to Finland and instead supplying Karlsborg's mill. This compensates Billerud for the loss of deliveries from forest owners in the north. Which is an equivalent compensation, also economically.

"It won't really matter to us which of these two players it comes from. They generally want to try to take the raw material about 20 miles in a radius around the mill itself," says Billerud's site manager in Karlsborg, Mikael Nordqvist, to Dagens Industri.

Billerud manufactures sack paper, formable paper and kraft paper at the mill in Karlsborg.

Lennart Håkansson

editor@northswedenbusiness.com