Yefimovsky is around 300 km away from the port of St. Petersburg. Aspec Les’s second sawmill is located 400 km north
Mayr-Melnhof Holz’s Russian site started operating in September 2009. At the time, €80 million had been invested in the 24-hectare big property. Over the years, a pellet mill and another heating plant were added, and several upgrades were made in the sawmill. Thus, over the course of these 13 years, the investment sum likely has doubled.
Great production figures, number one in Japan
At the Efimovskij site, Mayr-Melnhof Holz recently cut around 700,000 m³ of log wood a year, and produced 380,000 m³ of lumber and 60,000 tons of pellets each year. The sawmill supplied high-quality lumber to the Japanese market in particular, becoming the strongest Russian company there.
According to Russian business database SPARK, Mayr-Melnhof Holz Efimovskij’s sales exceeded RUB 10 billion (€130 million) in 2021, while profits of RUB 3 billion (€40 million) were recorded and the net asset value reached RUB 7.5 billion (€100 million; exchange rate as of December 27, 2022).
According to unconfirmed reports, the new owner paid around €10 million to acquire the production site. Everything was purchased by Aspec-Les (according to the Spark Interfax database: Aspek-Les). The company was only registered in June 2022 and is part of the Aspec Group. The latter is one of the largest holdings in the Udmurt Republic and includes more than 15 medium-sized and large companies, such as Aspec Domstroy (construction and development company), Aspec-Auto (official dealer of Ford, Toyota, KIA, Ford, Nissan, Lexus etc.) and the agricultural holding Aspec-Organik (information according to https://www.aspec.ru/).
Aspec-Les also owns the sawmill and glulam production of Solomensky Lesozavod in the Republic of Karelia. The “sister company” is located around 400 km north of Yefimovsky at Lake Onega.
The deal is part of a number of other “sales” which took place in the wake of the Ukraine war and EU sanctions against Russia. Stora Enso, for example, sold the Nebolchi and Impilahti sawmills to the local management.
The Efimovskij site had to deal with some bumps in the road over the years. The sawmill went into operation with a delay of about one year. Then, for years, a huge effort and massive Austrian support were required to promote log harvesting (and the construction of forest roads in particular). In addition, there were sharp fluctuations in revenue due to the volatile ruble/euro exchange rate.
And finally, this year also saw the war in Ukraine. After the start of the invasion, Mayr-Melnhof Holz’s sawmill struggled with difficult conditions in 2022. At first, the biggest operational problem was logistics. The headquarters in Leoben made daily coordination calls to the local management team. From July 10, this was also prohibited, and the local management had to act alone from that point on.
The Russian site can only be supplied with log wood when the ground in the forests is frozen. When the company did not order any timber harvest in late autumn, and there would have been hardly any log wood in 2023 as a result, rumors of an imminent shutdown started to circulate.
* Divestment is the process of selling longer-term assets in order to release tied-up capital.
