How does the new cross-laminated timber plant fit into your company’s corporate concept? What makes your production and products stand out?
Ferdinand Schneider: With our solid XL cross-laminated timber walls, we have completed our product portfolio for our existing customers – mainly carpentry and timber construction companies – which makes us a complete supplier for the entire building envelope. The machines in our new production facility in Meßkirch are not only geared towards CLT wall panels, though, but also – or rather primarily – towards the production of large-format ceiling elements. In order to guarantee continuous production, we built an online sawmill, which has a highly specialized cutting process and is fully automated from further processing to loading.
What role does the optimized use of materials play in your new production facility?
Ferdinand Schneider: In the new sawmill, we can flexibly cut logs from 12 to 90 cm in diameter. This allows us to minimize the cost of log transports and reduce the area from which we procure the raw material to a close radius. Since the sawmill is connected to the CLT production, it makes sense to saw lamellas for in-house use. We can then optimize the cutting patterns in such a way that they match demand for the finished products in order to make the best possible use of the materials.
How do you position yourself on the market and which markets will you focus on specifically?
Ferdinand Schneider: We want to continue to offer our products on the domestic market. As a direct supplier, we can deliver our customers’ orders reliably and just in time directly to the construction site with our own fleet of trucks on daily trips. We also optimized our transport system so that we can bring log wood to the production site when our trucks are on the way back from making deliveries. This creates a nice cycle of raw material and end products and helps us avoid unnecessary transports.
The market for cross-laminated timber will remain limited because it requires a lot of raw material input and is therefore much more dependent on the raw material itself.
How do you assess the current situation on the cross-laminated timber market, how will it develop and how will you deal with it?
Ferdinand Schneider: The situation is not surprising in itself. Cross-laminated timber is expensive and the market is limited. At our new production site in Meßkirch, we built a powerful and flexible plant that we can use to capacity even with smaller projects – which is in line with our customer base. This means that we are not dependent on large-scale projects in production.
Where will cross-laminated timber and the timber construction sector be heading in the coming years?
Ferdinand Schneider: We still expect a positive development in the timber construction sector. Multi-story timber construction in particular will continue to develop and grow. The market for cross-laminated timber, however, will remain limited because it requires a lot of raw material input and is therefore much more dependent on the raw material itself. We thus expect that the market will remain fiercely contested in the future as well.
