Krefeld, July 15, 2010 Another successful sale for Siempelkamp in Eastern Europe: In June, the Belorussian company VMG Industries Ltd. signed a contract for a complete particleboard plant which will be built at the Mogilev location in 2011. This plant is the first of its kind that Siempelkamp has designed to meet the special need for smaller capacities.

The main item of this order is a 7’ x 15.5 m ContiRoll® press. The Belgium Siempelkamp subsidiary Sicoplan has been commissioned with the planning and engineering. The expertise of the Group in the front-end area including machinery for chipping, particle production, screening, sifting and glue blending is also part of the order. The dryer is supplied by Büttner, the mat-forming machine by the Italian Siempelkamp subsidiary CMC Texpan. Siempelkamp Handling Systeme GmbH (SHS) is responsible for the cooling and stacking line as well as the sanding line. The plant will be built in the Free Economic Zone “Mogilev” in the Mogilev region, northeast of Belarus. This free trade zone, founded in 2002, was established to attract foreign and domestic companies and covers an area of approx. 242 ha.

With the new equipment VMG will produce 2,100 x 2,800 mm particleboards with a thickness ranging from 8 to 40 mm. This line has been designed for a yearly capacity of approx. 150,000 to 165,000 m³ of particleboard for the furniture industry. The exclusive customer of the boards will be the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA. Integrated production from raw par-ticleboards to finished furniture boards including production for furniture parts, plywood and shaped parts, as well as an energy plant downstream will be established on 35 ha in Mogilev. The close proximity and transport connections to future markets in Russia, the Ukraine and the Belorussian capital Minsk is in favor of the selected location. The region has good infrastructure; the road and rail networks are well developed.

The VMG Group has been cooperating with IKEA since 2002 and has become the largest producer of furniture parts for IKEA in the Baltic region. A similar particleboard project which was designed for raw board production was ordered from Siempelkamp in 2005 and started successful operation after construction was complete. This plant was sold to the IKEA sub-sidiary Swedwood in 2008.

Smart concept for optimal handling

This particleboard plant is the first of its kind that Siempelkamp has designed according to a specific economic investment concept which is customized to small capacities. The clear advantage: The small local plant clearly meets the need of its markets better than a mega-plant version which would not provide the desired results due to wood supply, raw material prices, and logistic costs. “We have attracted our customer with a custom-fit concept accord-ing to all general conditions which is tailored to downstream furniture production. The focus of the particleboard production on the finished furniture part as the end result in a compatible production process at one location provides our customer a cost-optimized and resource-efficient production,” says Dr.-Ing. Hans W. Fechner, CEO Siempelkamp Maschinen- und Anlagenbau GmbH & Co. KG, Krefeld, Germany.

Additional costs for packing and transports between production processes are omitted. Fur-thermore, waste products from the furniture and plywood production can be reused during particleboard production. Here, the customer benefits from resource-savings! As raw material for the production, industrial waste wood and wood from forestry thinning operations in sur-rounding forests, mainly poplar wood unsuitable as solid wood in other industrial branches, is used.

The start of the construction for this plant is scheduled for spring 2011. The plant is anticipated to run at full capacity at the end of 2011.