Europe’s largest sawn wood producer, Stora Enso, is the latest to scale back cross-laminated timber production outside Central Europe, revealing plans yesterday to close the 100,000 cubic metre CLT line at its Gruvön sawmill in western Sweden. It comes as Lech Muszyński, a professor of wood science and engineering at Oregon State University, found CLT plants had closed in countries including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Norway, even as output kept growing.
“Due to challenging market conditions, the prospects for sustainable profitability in CLT production at Gruvön have been limited,” said Jonas Lindqvist, head of Stora Enso’s Skoghall business unit. He said the planned change would allow the group to continue developing its “high-quality production of sawn and planed goods” at Gruvön, in line with its strategy.
Gruvön’s CLT line has been held back by slower-than-expected market growth in recent years, Stora Enso said, whilst higher wood costs have added to the relatively high fixed costs of making CLT. The negotiations involve the Nordic CLT sales team based at Gruvön, with up to 80 positions at risk.
“The Alpine region in Central Europe still accounts for over 68 per cent of the output,” wrote Muszyński and co-author Matthew Sparr in the final International Mass Timber Report last year. They found that Austria alone accounted for 38 per cent of the world’s CLT, with Europe’s makers together producing more than 82 per cent.
Muszyński and Sparr found world output rose 13 per cent to nearly 2.3 million cubic metres in 2024, though added capacity “does not immediately translate into a proportional increase in the production output”. A share of Europe’s output is also exported overseas, where its makers compete with local CLT producers despite tariffs and transport costs.
“Though demand was significantly lower in 2024 than in 2023, the mass timber industry hunkered down to get ready for the floodgates to open,” wrote Roy Anderson, vice president of The Beck Group, and co-author Erica Spiritos in the same report, who also found that North America’s panel makers were operating at less than 40 per cent of capacity, whilst the number of started or completed fell by 20% in 2024.
Stora Enso would serve its Nordic customers from its three other CLT mills, at Ždírec in Czechia and at Ybbs and Bad St. Leonhard in Austria, should the closure go ahead. Günther Jauk of Holzkurier, the Austrian timber journal, found that those mills cut output by 55,000 cubic metres to 160,000 cubic metres in 2024, with Ždírec accounting for 30,000 of that.
As it stands, all three belong to the Central European business Stora Enso put under strategic review last November, with a sale among the options it is assessing. The review is expected to finish by the end of the year, Holzkurier reported last week in an interview with Matthias Friedrich, the new head of Stora Enso’s southern business unit.
Jari Suominen, then executive vice president of Stora Enso’s Wood Products division, saw “extensive potential for CLT in the Nordic market” when the group committed €45 million to Gruvön nine years ago. He said demand for CLT and the group’s building systems was “constantly increasing”, with the company expecting the line to earn annual sales of 50 million euros at full capacity.
No decision on the Gruvön closure or on jobs will be made before the union negotiations end, Stora Enso said, adding that sawn timber deliveries from the mill will remain unaffected. Friedrich expects the market to stabilise at a low level in the short term, though he called a recovery in mass timber imminent despite the difficult conditions.
