Windsor wins over industry

Overseas forestry giants snap up the Wellington firm's custom-built wood-drying kilns, reports LIBBY MIDDLEBROOK.

A Wellington manufacturer is transforming the way international forestry firms dry large quantities of wood.

Windsor Engineering, one of New Zealand's largest kiln-drying equipment manufacturers, has scored several big supply contracts since expanding its filtration system business into the wood-drying industry 15 years ago.

Today forestry giants such as Weyerhaeuser, of the United States, and Chile's Aseraderos Minico pack their wood products into Windsor's custom-built kilns.

The kilns generate 70 per cent of Windsor's $20 million turnover.

"Kiln-drying can be pretty tricky," said Windsor chief executive Peter McKee.

"What you need at the end of a cycle is a quantity of timber that's dried to a fairly narrow moisture content level, while ensuring that the timber has maintained its structural integrity, and that's sometimes not an easy thing to do."

With help from research and development providers such as Forest Research, the smart technology behind Windsor's kilns is the company's computer-run software system which delicately measures and alters humidity, heat levels and air flow to ensure the best results.

The shells of the company's kilns also have the ability to expand and contract at high and low heats without crumbling, making them a hit with sawmillers and other wood processors. The kilns are also designed for high-moisture content woods such as radiata pine, which makes up the majority of New Zealand forestry plantations.

"In the old days, people would chuck in the wood, shut the door of a kiln and press go, and come back in a few days and hope the product was a bit drier," Mr McKee said. "What we can do is provide very narrow controls during the drying process to avoid things like warping and cracking of the wood."

The company was formed in 1974 by engineer Bill Studd, who is the company's major shareholder and chairman. The focus was initially on making furniture but after Mr Studd designed a dust collection system for the business, orders started coming in for filter systems along with the furniture.

When Windsor started producing large-scale filter systems for sawmillers in the late 70s the company discovered kiln-drying.

"The filtration side of the business was doing work in the timber game and was therefore exposed to the requirements of sawmills, along with becoming associated with people at Forest Research, who were looking at timber-drying technologies. It was a gap in the market and partly being at the right place at the right time."

Windsor, which focuses on the drying of soft wood products, forged a strong alliance with Forest Research and in the mid-80s started producing custom-designed kilns for local companies.

Ranging in price from $280,000 to $800,000, Windsor's wood cookers take between 30 to 120cu m of timber a time.

The company employs 90 people and has boosted annual revenue from $7 million in 1991 up to $20 million.

It sold its first kiln to the United States last year to Weyerhaeuser for $800,000.

With a subsidiary business in Australia and agents overseas, the low level of the New Zealand dollar has improved the company's competitive edge in the international market.

However, despite gains made during the past decade, Windsor has not been able to escape the peaks and troughs of the global forestry market.

When the Asian economic crisis sent log prices crashing in 1997, orders for upgrades and new kilns were cancelled as forestry companies scaled back harvests.

Mr McKee said it taught the company a tough lesson about the benefits of high market coverage across regions such as Europe, rather than simply limiting marketing and sales to Asia-Pacific.

To ride out the market downturn, Windsor worked hard at maintaining relationships with customers to ensure business was able to recover when log prices picked up.

"We said to ourselves, `If the kiln business isn't going to be as busy as we would like, we're still going to maintain our presence in the business to make sure we can pick up every bit of work we possibly can'."

While the late 90s were not a great period for many businesses associated with the wood industry, the next 20 years are expected to provide lucrative opportunities.

An extra 19 million cu m of wood is expected to be harvested in New Zealand by 2020, while some South American countries, including Chile, are expecting an upswing in wood-processing.

"There's an awful lot of wood that's becoming available here and we're pretty confident about the future. We see really good business in New Zealand for the next few years. We're targeting those areas where wood availability is going to grow."