One August night in 1929 Emil Höglund and Edvin Wiik were sitting at the Finnström inn in Maxmo discussing their future. They were both in the timber business, Emil Höglund as a clerk at Hellnäs sawmill and Edvin Wiik as an independent buyer selling timber to the sawmills. Hellnäs sawmill had fallen on hard times and defaulted on its payments. Both men were now facing the prospect of looking for new work.
They started up with modest enough capital. Emil Höglund managed to borrow some money privately, whereas Edvin Wiik put in his own and his father’s savings as starting capital. The company was to engage in trade in round timber, pit props and pulpwood. Right from the start the division of labour was clear: Wiik was to see to the buying, while Höglund, who had studied at a commercial college and spent some time in England in 1928, looked after sales and bookkeeping.
Thanks to the new partners’ familiarity with the sector and their contact network, the new company got off to a good start. The company signed its first contract as early as October 1929, with a timber-exporting company, and later that same autumn concluded deals direct with a French buyer. They did well in their first year, and by September 1930 Emil Höglund was able to repay his loan.
During the next few years trade was less good, thanks to the worldwide recession which started with the crash of the New York stock exchange in 1929. Finland had exported large quantities of round timber, mainly to Britain, France, Germany and Holland. Exports of pulpwood fell by as much as 70%, however, between 1930 and 1931. It took till 1933 before exports to the Continent climbed back and 1934 was already a good year, in which exports doubled to 1,333,000 cubic metres.
Though fortune smiled on Wiik & Höglund in its first year, the next two years were very hard. Any plans for expansion had to be shelved. The buyer organization that had been set up, with local representatives in various parts of Finland, was practically idle. In 1931 sales were only half the figure in the company’s first year. Added to everything, the summer of 1932 was so dry that the company could not start floating its timber until the late autumn.
In summer 1933 there was a major forest fire in Peräseinäjoki, and over 1,000 hectares of timber were destroyed. Edvin Wiik got in quickly and offered what later turned out to be a rock-bottom price for the felling rights. It was a risk, but one that turned out well, and as a result the company’s financial situation was solid when it started to expand.
In the late 1930s Wiik & Höglund expanded fast, becoming one of the major round timber exporters in Finland. Before the Second World War its buyers covered the whole area from Rovaniemi in the far north right across to Vyborg in the southeast. Emil Höglund travelled as a salesman to Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and Britain. There were proper offices not only in Vaasa, but also in Rovaniemi, Kokkola, Laihia, Kristiinankaupunki and Pori. By 1939 Wiik & Höglund was the biggest timber exporter in Finland, accounting for 26% of the country’s total lumber exports and some 20% of pulpwood exports. That year the company exported altogether 612,000 cubic metres of round timber, a figure that was not topped until 1952, during the boom caused by the Korean War.
The profits earned in the late 1930s were invested in fixed assets. The Petsmo sawmill was bought in 1936, and after the war sawmill operations were expanded rapidly, giving the company five sawmills of its own by 1950. Timber was carried on company ships, for in 1939 Wiik & Höglund had become a shareholder in the Vasa Rederi Ab shipping company, and later bought up the entire stock. There were also plans for a new sulphate pulp mill in Jakobstad, in association with certain other exporters. These plans were shelved, however, because in 1937 Wiik & Höglund were urged by their bank to buy a share in the Jakobstads Cellulosa pulp company, and Emil Höglund became a member of the Board. This holding was later increased, and in the 1960s Wiik & Höglund and Keppo jointly held 15% of the major wood-processing company Oy Wilh. Schauman Ab, making them the biggest private shareholder.
During the war years Wiik & Höglund exporting came almost to a halt and other products had to be acquired to compensate. Firewood and woodchips now became the most important. Woodchips were a typical wartime product.
Birch chips were needed to fuel the gas generators used to power cars and boats. Edvin Wiik was the motivating force behind the woodchip production, and at one stage, three of the company’s mills produced woodchips. The company sold their product to the Germans and the Finnish army, and to the State authorities.
After the war, life gradually got back to normal. Exports of round timber started up again and the company’s old customers in West Germany, France and Holland once again became the biggest trading partners. Profitability was good and profits were ploughed back into fixed assets, mainly forest. The biggest single purchase was of the manor of Skinnarvik and the estate of Lennäs on the island of Kimito in 1949; with them came 1,300 hectares of excellent woodland. A few years later the company bought 2,200 hectares of forest in Kestilä and Siikajoki. Altogether 7,400 hectares of timber were acquired, representing a valuable asset.
Bundling and loading pulpwood at Tottesund in Maksamaa at the end of the 1950s.
The most important — and retrospectively the most crucial — investment came in autumn 1951, when Wiik & Höglund moved into plastics. Actually, it all happened by chance. For a few years Wiik & Höglund had been supplying timber to Holmsund AB near Umeå in Sweden. Holmsund AB had been doing good business in plastic floor tiles for some time, and offered Wiik & Höglund sole manufacturing rights in Finland.
Edvin Wiik was full of enthusiasm for this project, while Emil Höglund was more cautious and wanted to find out more about the profitability of such operations first. After all, plastic was a rather little-known material in Finland in the 1950s. Plastic manufacturing was not a wholly new area for the two business partners, however. The real pioneer in Finnish plastics manufacturing was the Nars family, who had originally made their fortune in timber. In 1948, the Nars family were first in Finland to manufacture calendered PVC foils, and they soon expanded their product range to include plastic hose, profiles and floor coverings, at their rapidly expanding manufacturing facilities in Jakobstad.
The licence agreement with Holmsund AB was signed on September 22, 1951. Thus, the seed of the transformation from trading company to industrial enterprise was sown.
There was still a long road to travel, however, before Wiik & Höglund became a pure industrial enterprise. The first machines were installed in the cramped basement of an apartment house owned by the company at Hovioikeudenpuistikko 20 in Vaasa. Tor Wiik, Edvin Wiik’s son, was put in charge and the engineer Walter Flander was appointed technical manager.
Soon, however, the enterprise needed more space and in 1952 the company obtained from Finska Forcit - Dynamit Ab the right to lease the land on which the KWH Group’s plastic pipe plant still stands today. The old brick building on the site was renovated and in 1953 production was well under way.