Möjliga strategier för Holmens framtida skogsägande
med avseende på virkesmarknadens historiska och framtida utveckling
The purpose of this thesis was to study Holmen?s possible future ownership, concerning their forestland in Sweden. We have compared the strategy of the present owning of forests with three different alternatives. These three alternatives are: 1) selling all the forestland, 2) establish a new company which owns the forest where Holmen is the major stockholder and finally 3) an alternative were the two northerly regions are sold. We used Holmen?s annual account from the year 2002 as a bare year and made a reconstruction of the annual account in the three different alternatives. We calculated key figures that describes profitability for each alternative. This makes it possible to compare the alternatives with the profitability of today.
We have also taken the new international accounting standards, IAS, into consideration.
These new accounting standards mean that Holmen must present the forests market value in
the balance sheet. We interviewed representatives from the Swedish forest sector, to give us an overview of the forthcoming development of the roundwood market in Sweden. We summarized the interviews in a possible future development. This made it possible to create three scenarios concerning price development and other important factors that affect the roundwood market.
The three scenarios are: declining prices on roundwood, increasing price levels and
unchanged prices. We have discussed how the different scenarios affects the presented forest owning alternatives.
The results of this study indicate that the most favourable alternative is to sell the forestland. It generates the best business ratios in general. This indication became even stronger when we took the new international accounting standards into consideration. The price development of roundwood didn?t seem to affect the strategy for forest owning.