Timber Group grows – Schweighofer strikes again at Holz

Gerald Schweighofer (64) is a colorful personality in the wood industry. Born in Lower Austria, he first built up Schweighofer Holzindustrie into a group with six sites in Austria and the Czech Republic and sold everything to the Finnish company Stora Enso in 2001.

But just two years later, Schweighofer started all over again in Romania. Today, his HS Timber Group has a turnover of almost one billion euros and more than 3,500 employees. Only the holding company is in Vienna, the companies are in Romania, Germany, soon also in Finland and Argentina. It is exported all over the world, as far as Japan.

“What has distinguished us for decades has been our adaptability,” explains Schweighofer. “Climate change has reached wood, so we need to diversify.” He recently took over the Finnish sawmill Luvian Saha Oy (300,000 m³ production, 120 employees).

Together with a Belgian partner, a new sawmill is being completed in Argentina, which after commissioning will have a processing capacity of 500,000 cubic meters of solid matter. “Argentina and Finland are a perfect fit for the portfolio,” says Schweighofer. A factory of similar size is also being built in Belarus. But everything has come to a standstill because of the sanctions. In Romania, a sawmill was shut down due to increasing raw material problems, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. In the country, the Timber Group also operates a production of glued timber. Schweighofer has had a factory in Saxony (D) since 2015. Because he owns forests in the Czech Republic and Romania, where the raw material wood comes from.

The diversification has been stopped for the time being: the Interfloat Group, Europe’s largest solar glass producer (300 employees), acquired in 2020 together with Blueminds (Christian Kern’s company had 16 percent), was sold in April 2022 to the Indian Borosil Renewables, which is a larger company. player.