A 700-year-old company is splitting itself in two -- and the forest half may be the more valuable story.
In March 2026, Stora Enso - the Finnish-Swedish forestry and packaging giant - completed a milestone step toward one of the most consequential corporate separations in European natural resources history. The company unveiled the full executive management team of its planned new forest asset company, set to be demerged from the parent group and independently listed on Nasdaq Stockholm and Nasdaq Helsinki by the first half of 2027. The entity taking shape in the forests of central Sweden will instantly rank among the largest private forest owners anywhere on the planet - a pure-play timber company controlling over 1.2 million hectares of productive Swedish forest land valued at approximately EUR 5.7 billion. What makes this moment significant is not just the scale. It is the deliberate, strategic decision by a legacy industrial company to treat its forests not as a feedstock appendage, but as a distinct and independently valuable asset class - one capable of delivering inflation-resilient returns, carbon sequestration income, and renewable energy revenues that a packaging business will never generate.
Tuomas Hallenberg assumed his role as President and CEO of the new forest company on January 1, 2026. His appointment, first announced in November 2025, marks the beginning of an independent organizational identity for what has historically been buried inside Stora Enso's broader operations. Hallenberg holds a Master of Science degree in Forestry in Forest Management Planning from the University of Joensuu in Finland, along with an MBA. His career maps precisely to the kind of deep operational and strategic experience the role demands.
Before joining Stora Enso in 2024 as Executive Vice President of its Forest Business Area, Hallenberg spent the preceding decade at Metsahallitus - Finland's national state-owned forest company - where he rose to Senior Vice President of Property Development and Renewables. Before that, from 1998 to 2014, he held multiple leadership roles at UPM, one of Finland's other forestry giants, focused primarily on wood sourcing and forest operations. In a single career, Hallenberg has navigated the full operational sweep of Nordic forestry: harvesting logistics, wood supply chains, land value management, and the emerging renewables overlap with timberland. He is, in other words, exactly the profile a company needs when it is trying to persuade public markets that forests are not a commodity play, but a sophisticated, multi-revenue asset category.
The executive team Hallenberg now leads is deliberately compact - four members in total. Martin Ros has been appointed Chief Financial Officer. Ros comes from within Stora Enso, where he most recently served as Senior Vice President for Strategy and Finance in the Biomaterials Business Area. He studied forestry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and business administration at Umea University - a dual formation that positions him at the precise intersection of forest valuation and investor communications the new company will require.
Johan Djurberg takes the role of Head of Forestry. He currently serves as Vice President of Wood Supply at Billerud and is expected to join the new company no later than June 2026. Djurberg previously worked at Stora Enso in senior positions within wood supply, forestry operations, and supply chain management, and holds a Master of Science from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umea. His is the sole external appointment in the senior team - a signal that the new company is drawing from a tight, specialist talent pool across the Nordic timber industry. Pontus Selderman rounds out the team as General Counsel, coming directly from his current position as Senior Vice President for Forest Legal and ESG Regulatory at Stora Enso. He holds a Master of Laws from Uppsala University and brings deep expertise in compliance, intellectual property, and the increasingly complex regulatory environment surrounding forest ESG obligations.
The landholding at the core of this demerger is difficult to fully comprehend in the abstract. More than 1.2 million hectares of Swedish forest land translates to roughly the combined area of Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Of that, approximately 1.0 million hectares is productive forest land - the portion actively generating timber volume, growth, and harvest income. Swedish forest assets have delivered a total return of approximately 7% per annum over the last 30 years, combining land appreciation, standing stock net volume growth, and annual harvest returns. That figure puts Swedish timberland comfortably in the range of long-cycle institutional asset classes, with a key differentiator: forest returns have historically shown low correlation to public equity and bond markets over the business cycle.
The planned headquarters in Falun, Sweden is not incidental. Falun is the town that gave its name to the Falun copper mine - once the most productive in the world, and the original founding asset of Stora Kopparberg, the company that through centuries of mergers and transformations eventually became Stora Enso. The oldest known preserved share in any company in the world was issued by Stora Kopparberg in 1288. The decision to base the new forest company in Falun thus carries a distinct kind of continuity: a company that traced its roots to extracting copper from the Swedish earth will now anchor its forest arm to the same geography, this time harvesting trees and carbon rather than ore.
Before the demerger can proceed, Stora Enso already undertook a preparatory transaction. In mid-2025, the company divested approximately 175,000 hectares of Swedish forest land - roughly 12.4% of its total Swedish holdings - to a consortium comprising Soya Group (a Norwegian shipping and energy conglomerate) and a MEAG-led consortium, with MEAG serving as the asset manager for Munich Re, the German insurance giant. The enterprise value of the transaction was SEK 9.8 billion, equivalent to approximately EUR 900 million. Stora Enso retained a 15% ownership stake in the resulting vehicle and secured a 15-year renewable timber supply agreement. That sale was not incidental to the demerger plan - it served two functions: it reduced net debt (contributing to an improvement in the company's net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio to 2.8) and it established a transaction-derived valuation benchmark for the remaining portfolio at approximately EUR 5.15 million per hectare.
The case for separating forest assets from industrial operations is not new in the global timber industry. In North America, companies like Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier converted to Real Estate Investment Trust structures precisely to unlock the valuation premium that pure-play timberland exposure commands among institutional investors. European markets have been slower to follow, partly due to structural differences in forest ownership patterns and partly because major integrated forestry companies have historically resisted the accounting and operational complexity of separation.
Stora Enso's strategic review, initiated in June 2025 by President and CEO Hans Sohlstrom, explicitly framed the question in these terms. The forests possess, as Sohlstrom put it, "a distinct operational, financial, and strategic profile" from the industrial packaging and renewables business. Running both inside a single listed entity creates valuation compression - investors unable to clearly price the long-duration forest asset end up discounting it alongside the more cyclical industrial operations. By separating the two, Stora Enso is betting that each business will command a premium it currently does not receive.
The demerger structure chosen - a statutory partial cross-border demerger - is tax-efficient for shareholders. Rather than receiving cash from a sale, all current Stora Enso shareholders will receive shares in the new company proportional to their existing holdings, preserving the existing A and R share structure. Major shareholders Solidium Oy and FAM AB - which together hold approximately 21% of shares and 55% of voting rights - have publicly supported the transaction. The planned announcement of the formal cross-border demerger is expected in the second half of 2026, with completion targeted for the first half of 2027.
The two companies will not operate at arm's length entirely: Stora Enso will enter an 18-year long-term wood supply agreement with the new forest company, securing a commercial relationship that benefits both parties. For the packaging business, this provides supply certainty. For the forest company, it provides contracted volume and revenue visibility - useful when approaching debt markets for the first time as a standalone entity.
The new company's investment thesis extends well beyond timber sales. Stora Enso's communications have consistently pointed toward three areas of incremental value: advanced forest management, renewable energy, and carbon sequestration. In each case, the argument is that an independent, focused company will pursue these opportunities more aggressively than a subsidiary buried inside a EUR 9.3 billion industrial conglomerate.
Renewable energy is the most immediately tangible. Swedish forest land is, by nature, sparsely populated and geographically exposed - ideal terrain for wind power installations. Forest companies in the Nordic countries have increasingly entered leasing agreements with wind developers, generating steady income from land that continues to function as productive timber ground beneath and around turbines. As a listed entity with its own capital allocation agenda, the new company will be free to accelerate these lease agreements in ways that Stora Enso's diversified management priorities have historically constrained.
Carbon sequestration represents the longer-dated opportunity. European carbon markets are maturing, and the EU's Carbon Farming Initiative is expanding the regulatory framework through which forest owners can monetize the carbon stored in standing timber. Over 1.2 million hectares of boreal forest constitutes a material carbon sink - and as carbon pricing evolves and verification standards tighten, the commercial value of that sink could become a measurable and recurring revenue line.
The board proposed for the new company reflects these priorities. Marcus Wallenberg, Chair of Stora Enso's Shareholders' Nomination Board, described the selection as bringing together expertise across "forestry, finance, investment management, energy, sustainability, and strategic marketing." The combination is deliberate: the new company needs to speak simultaneously to timber industry buyers, ESG-focused institutional investors, carbon market counterparties, and energy developers.
The demerger is not without complications. Regulatory and co-determination procedures across multiple countries must be completed before the transaction can formally proceed. Stora Enso's own 2025 results - full-year sales of EUR 9.3 billion and adjusted EBIT of EUR 528 million - were delivered against a backdrop the company itself described as a "challenging macroeconomic and market environment," with low consumer confidence and geopolitical volatility reducing predictability. Packaging and pulp demand remain subdued. Timber markets face their own headwinds from the persistent slump in European construction activity.
Critics of the structure could also point out that what is being created is, in effect, a company with a single major customer - Stora Enso itself - for a significant portion of its wood supply revenue. TâĤ