Vida AB will permanently close its Orrefors pine mill and Urshult spruce mill in southern Sweden within months, stripping 265,000 cubic metres of annual lumber capacity and ending 75 jobs across the two workforces. That is according to Karl-Johan Löwenadler, CEO of Sweden’s largest privately owned sawmill company, who pointed to a persistent imbalance between sawmill capacity and fibre supply across Götaland as the trigger for the shutdowns.
Wppd Central understands that the Orrefors site saws and planes pine into structural timber, with a 45-person workforce and an annual output of 145,000 cubic metres. Much of its volume is run through wood preservatives on a subcontract basis before shipping 40 per cent to Great Britain, 40 per cent to Sweden and 20 per cent to other export markets. The Urshult mill is the larger of the two — 30 employees turning out 185,000 cubic metres of 4.9-metre structural spruce a year against a 130,000-cubic-metre planing capacity, with output running 60 per cent into Great Britain, 15 per cent each into Japan and Germany, and the remaining 10 per cent into other markets including the United States.
Löwenadler said Vida had weighed the southern Sweden supply position against the cost structure across its smaller sites, with the group choosing concentration over continued operation at sub-scale capacity to strengthen competitiveness across its remaining sawmill base. “The closures are necessary given the imbalance between production capacity and access to fibre,” Löwenadler said.
The shutdowns tighten the supply of structural pine and spruce to the UK market, where Vida already runs as one of the larger Swedish suppliers across CLS, TR26 stress-graded roof truss timber, and other engineered structural lines. Wood Central understands the 4.9-metre Urshult spruce is a long-length product that builders and merchants in the Great Britain market have come to rely on for cut-down efficiency across roof-truss and joist applications.
It comes as Sweden’s forest industries continue to absorb a sustained fibre squeeze across the country’s south, with the sector’s Green Business Index falling to its weakest quarterly reading since the pandemic in late 2025 and Sweden’s sawmills now facing at least SEK 2 billion in additional operating costs in 2026 under EU Emissions Trading System reforms and rail freight charges. Former Vida CEO Måns Johansson told industry forums in late 2025 that nine in ten Swedish sawmills were running at a loss, with raw material costs at record levels even as sawn timber prices weakened.
Wood Central understands the Götaland supply picture has been further unsettled by back-to-back storm events, with hurricane-force Storm Dave felling 2 million cubic metres of Swedish timber across southern Sweden over Easter — 61 per cent of it spruce and 35 per cent pine — and the earlier Storm Johannes flattening close to 11 million cubic metres across central and northern Sweden over the 2025-2026 Christmas period. The surge in salvage volume across both storms has compressed log grades and prices and accelerated the spread of spruce bark beetle into wind-thrown stands, with smaller sawmills the most exposed to the resulting grade-and-price squeeze.
Sweden’s Ips typographus outbreak has stripped a further 34 million cubic metres of Norway spruce from the country’s base since 2018, with pulp and biorefinery demand pulling further roundwood volume away from the structural timber sector across the same period. The combined weight of beetle damage, storm salvage, and bioeconomy competition has tilted the fibre balance in southern Sweden against smaller, single-product sawmills like Orrefors and Urshult.
The Orrefors shutdown ends a six-year run for Vida at the site, with the company only acquiring the mill from Bergs Timber in September 2020 alongside Vimmerby, Mörlunda and the then-closed Gransjö facility in a SEK 303 million transaction the group at the time presented as the platform for taking combined output across the three operating sites to 500,000 cubic metres per year. Vida has since added the AB Karl Hedin Sågverk mills at Karbenning, Krylbo and Säter to its central Sweden operations, completing that acquisition in September 2025 and taking the group’s total annual production capacity to approximately 2.1 billion board feet.
The shutdowns take effect once Swedish labour consultation processes conclude, with Vida set to operate 13 sawmills across central and southern Sweden once Orrefors and Urshult are wound down, alongside its packaging, specialty finishing, modular housing and logistics businesses. Canfor Corporation acquired its initial 70 per cent stake in Vida in 2019 for approximately CAD$580 million and has since increased its holding to 77 per cent, with the Swedish business now operating as one division within Canfor’s global portfolio of more than 50 forest products facilities across Canada, the United States and Europe.
