Dmitry Rudenko, Vice President of Segezha Group: demand for wooden houses currently exceeds the productive capacity

The share of wooden houses in the total low-rise housing construction in the USA, Canada, and Finland is over 80%. The share of total wooden housing construction reaches 50% in many countries, while in Russia it is only 12%. Many developed countries are also intensifying construction using cross-laminated timber (CLT). This European technology appeared in 1993. It has been approved in Canada since 2010 and in the USA since 2014. The Russian CLT “ambassador” is Segezha Group and its new production site in the town of Sokol with a capacity of 50,000 m³ per year. Investments in the project amounted to over 3 billion rubles. WhatWood Agency interviewed Dmitry Rudenko, Vice President of Segezha Group, about the expectations for wooden housing construction and the CLT construction technology that is relatively new for Russia.

– Mr. Rudenko, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. At Segezha Group, you are in charge of a relatively young department for housing construction. Is this activity of the Group already successful? 

– The department is young, although the idea of wooden housing construction is not new at all. Many would like to develop it in our country but it all is moving at a snail’s pace. We decided to develop this activity in 2017.

Segezha Group has an asset, Sokolsky DOK, that mainly produced sawn timber a while back. We have completely modernized our production facilities and now the plant almost entirely services the housing construction market: it produces glued products, beams for roofing systems, and glued laminated timber houses.

Besides that, we decided to build new factories to produce wooden elements and structures for housing construction. We think that the future lies in the industrialized wooden housing construction.

– In December 2020, Segezha Group announced the start of CLT production at Sokolsky DOK, please tell us more about it.

– It should be clarified that we have two enterprises focused on wooden housing construction. The first is Sokolsky DOK which, as I said earlier, produces beams for roofing systems and glued laminated timber houses; we are the absolute leaders in this field in Russia, and we supply both to the European and domestic markets.

And there is a separate enterprise, Sokol CLT, that only produces CLT panels. It is located at the site of Sokolsky DOK and is integrated with it: the sawn timber produced at the plant then go to the CLT production shop. However, these are two different plants.

Read the full interview in Russian Timber Journal 01-2021.