The Latvijas Berzs company was founded in Latvia in 1873 making blackboards and carpenters’ pencils and moved into plywood production in 1909.
In 1923, the Furniers plywood mill was established and in 1929 the Lignum mill was added to Latvia’s plywood industry.
Soon the country had 12 plywood manufacturing companies making 54,000m3/year with the vast majority being exported to countries within Europe.
However, the onset of World War II and the subsequent take-over of Latvia by the Soviet Union saw a major decline in the industry. During the Soviet occupation (1945-1991), plywood was only made from Russian logs and most of the panels produced went to the Soviet market.
With the independence of Latvia in 1991, the plywood business fell sharply as there was no longer a supply of Russian logs, but then the industry underwent something of a revival and once again used the country’s own wood resources to make birch veneer.
In October 1992, the state-owned Plywood Production Union of Latvia, which had been established in 1975, became the joint-stock company Latvijas Finieris and that company has since continually modernised and expanded its product range.
It has modernised all its plants and now offers a wide range of birch plywoods in exterior and interior grades, overlaid with films, decorative-veneered, painted and special plywoods for laser cutting.
Applications include concrete shuttering, transport, interior walls, furniture, shopfitting, lockers, chairs, exterior walls, toys, sports halls and skateboard ramps.
Latvijas Finieris produced its millionth m3 of plywood in 2002 – 10 years after its creation.
In 1995, the company established a subsidiary called Troja Ltd to make wooden toys. Troja is also a plywood processor.
Latvijas Berzs ceased plywood production in 2002 and now concentrates on the production of furniture and furniture parts.
Like all countries emerging from under the Soviet thumb, Latvia had to re-establish itself in an open international marketplace and find its own customers. It has now developed a network of trading enterprises, with subsidiary companies of Latvijas Finieris in Sweden, Germany, the UK, Spain, North America, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland and Japan.
The company has also invested heavily in new equipment and new capacity for plywood production at its mills.
In 2000 a new production line was established at the Furniers mill, specialising in the production of 5ft x 10ft panels, and the whole factory was refurbished.
In 2004, a new generation peeling line, supplied by Raute, was set up at the Lignums plant to complement the existing line from Japanese supplier Uroko.
But it is not just modernisation which is receiving attention. The company’s latest investment plan is due to come on stream in 2007.
This is a completely new plant for the production of plywood, in the Latgale region of Latvia, with a planned capacity of 65,000m3/year. Investment will total LVL56m (US$99m) in this project alone.
For 2005, Latvijas Finieris plans to produce 222,000m3 of glued products and to exceed LVL100m turnover, logging 510,000m3 of wood, some being imported.
The company does have its own birch plantations – over 1,000ha of them – and these are currently used for scientific research and public education. There is also a nursery in Zabaki producing half a million birch saplings annually.
Not that Latvia is short of wood generally. The country was 45% forested as at January 2004, compared with 24% in 1930.
The forest is approximately 50% stateowned and 50% in the private sector.
However, a disastrous storm in January this year brought down about 7.3 million m3 of wood – equivalent to about half the annual cut – but the country can apparently absorb this loss without too much problem.
The mix of tree species nationally is about 37% pine, 30% birch, 19% spruce and 14% others such as aspen.
The capacity of the Furniers mill is around 60,000m3/year, mainly as 5ft x 10ft panels and nearly all exterior grade. There is a total of five peeling lines housed in their own  building and logs are soaked for 24-36 hours at about 45oC before peeling.
Roller coaters are used to apply the phenolic resin to the dried veneers which are then laid up into embryonic plywood and put into Raute cold presses.
The newest hot press, installed in 2000, is a Raute 30-daylight computer-controlled unit.
There is an inspection/filling line where  workers make a visual inspection and repair minor imperfections in the faces of the panels. This is followed by a Steinemann sander.
Close to the Furniers mill is the Troja mill, where Latvijas Finieris makes loudspeaker boxes and wooden toys, notably rocking-horse chairs for small children.
Troja is equipped with a Schelling panel saw and an SCM Record 240 router for cutting out shapes; at the time of my visit it was being used to cut out circular table tops.
This factory also has forming presses for pressing curved shapes such as chair backs, column claddings or a variety of other uses.
The company’s other plywood production facility, the Lignums mill on the outskirts of Riga, has six peeling lines: one by Italian company Cremona, four by Raute and one by Uroko, and an annual capacity of around 150,000m3.
The factory produces mainly 4ft x 8ft and 4ft x 10ft panels, although it can also produce some 5ft x 10ft.
The mill is equipped with a variety of manufacturers’ equipment including Hashimoto veneer clippers and Omeco, Babcock and Raute driers.
It employs Plytec automatic defect detection guillotines and Plytec patching machines, while stitching is by Kuper.
There are five 17-daylight hot presses, one Steinemann and one Timesavers sanding line and a Schelling cut-to-size system.
The Lignums factory also has a paper impregnation line for the production of phenol impregnated paper for overlays and one Raute short-cycle press and two multidaylight presses to apply that film to panels for shuttering and transport uses.
Some pre-impregnated film is also bought in from Stora Enso and 40% of production at Lignums is film-faced.
Latvia is a small country, with a population of just 2.3 million of which around one million live in Riga or its suburbs.
The forest products industry is vital to the economy, accounting for 40% of total exports, while 85% of wood product production is exported as sawn wood, plywood or particleboard.
Latvijas Finieris is continuing to invest in its plywood production capacity and downstream products and as such must be a valuable contributor to the economy of one of the European Union’s newest member countries.

Established only in 2001, the Baltic Furniture group, BBG, headquartered in Lithuania, claims to be “one of the most booming furniture companies in Lithuania” with ambitions to become a leader in the European arena.
Until recently, the group comprised four manufacturing companies, which exported around 98% of their production. The fourth and most recent member of the group was Latvian particleboard maker Bolderaja, though as we shall see, that company was sold in July this year.
AB Freda, one of the founding companies of the BBG group and located in the town of Kaunas, makes furniture from particleboard coated with various surface films, as well as with painted finishes, and specialises in living room furniture such as cupboards, chests of drawers, beds and shelves. The factory was extended and new machinery purchased last year, with further expansion planned for this year.
AB Dilikas is located in Klaipéda on the west coast of Lithuania and makes furniture from wood-veneered particleboard and solid pine with UV finishes; it aims to make 52% of its products from solid wood this year.
JSC Wood Team Production has its factory in Vievis, between Kaunas and Vilnius,and specialises in solid wood furniture manufactured from pine and birch and hasa new birch sawmill together with drying and processing, to guarantee its supply ofsuitable raw material.
In mid-2004, BBG crossed the border and acquired Latvian particleboard manufacturer
Bolderaja, one of the largest wood processing enterprises in Latvia.
A series of investments throughout the BBG group in 2003 in new technology, factory premises, staff and quality improvements boosted sales volume from LTL100m (US$176m) to LTL193m and in 2004, sales growth almost doubled.
That acquisition of Bolderaja, whose factory is located close to the Latvian capital Riga, gave the group an assured supply of particleboard and at the same time offered it a buffer against price fluctuations in the market.
Bolderaja makes particleboard in various thicknesses and to E1 grade. It also applies melamine facing to the raw board and manufactures the melamine edgebanding.
Flooring grade is also a speciality.
The newest venture for Bolderaja under BBG ownership was a move into furniture manufacture at the end of 2004, producing simple melamine-faced particleboard cabinets. The plan of BBG was that furniture would represent 30% of the company’s total sales volume this year, in line with the ambitions of BBG group in furniture production at all its factories.
However, on July 25 this year, BBG sold Bolderaja to Kronospan Holdings Ltd of Nikosia, Cyprus.