Taking OSBs to Europe

Norbord is acknowledged as the leading manufacturer of Oriented Strand Board (OSB) worldwide. It currently has 19 plants and employs a total of around 2 600 people. This year, the company is celebrating its 25th anniversary in the German- speaking region.
In 1991 the boards were produced exclusively in the Norbord plant in Inverness, Scotland. This plant was built in the early 1980s and was the first-ever European OSB production site.
As well as OSB, the company also offered plywood from the Canadian plants Noranda and Richply until the end of the 1990s. The demand for OSB developed positively with a daily delivery of 150 lorry loads in Germany today compared to only 10 lorry loads for the whole of 1991. Nowadays, the DACH market is no longer supplied from Scotland but from the Belgian plant in Genk.
"Since the company started up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there have been a great deal of changes", recalls Reiner Kohlwey, Head of Marketing and Acquisition in the DACH region. But what has remained stable "is the shift between too much OSB and not enough, and between rising and falling prices".

Recently the demand for OSB has risen dramatically. Norbord reacted immediately and at the end of January announced an investment in the region of € 124.75 mio for the Inverness site. By the middle of 2017, the production capacity should almost double at this site.
Between 1996 and 2006, the ownership and distribution structures changed numerous times in the European business field. In 1996 Norbord became CSC Forest Products for four years - a joint venture with Norbord UK and Glunz UK. In Germany, Norbord wound up its sales in 2002 and handed it over to Finnforest Germany. Ten years later, this cooperation was terminated. During this time, Norbord took over the production of OSB manufacturers Agglo in Genk in 2005, as a platform for further growth in Europe.Norbord...
... although a listed company, it is accompanied by a main shareholder family. The headquarter of Norbord Incorporated is based in Toronto, Canada. The company has been present in Europe for around 40 years with a headquarter in Cowie, Scotland. Today the company manufactures in four plant sites in Europe - three of them in Great Britain with approx. 700 employees and 1.5 mio m³ of OSB…