The world’s oldest industrial corporation is still going strong. Where? In Sweden. In operation 73 years after King John signed the Magna Carta and more than 200 years before Columbus discovered America, Sweden’s Stora Kopparberg Bergslags Aktiebolag has fueled Sweden’s industrial growth over the centuries, and today is a modern diversified giant whose eye is on the future. Stora Kopparberg is Sweden’s largest producer of electricity, one of the biggest manufacturers of pulpwood and newsprint (with exports to 40 nations), the largest supplier of dairy and agricultural produce, the biggest steelmaker and a major producer of industrial chemicals. As if that were not enough, Stora Kopparberg also manufactures the red paint that covers cottages throughout the picturesque Swedish countryside.
Hell & Glory. Like its name, the company’s history is linked to Stora Kopparberg—a great subterranean copper “mountain” of unusually pure copper ore located among the gloomy forests of central Sweden. Toward the end of the Dark Ages, when copper was needed to arm Europe’s growing armies, hundreds of men migrated to the copper mountain. At the pithead sprang up the village of Falun, Sweden’s first industrial center, where the company still has its headquarters. At first each miner dug and smelted the ore himself, but by 1347 King Magnus Eriksson had granted a charter setting up a corporation of master miners. The largest copper supplier in medieval Europe, Kopparberg made Sweden a major political power; its profits financed King Gustavus Adolphus’ part in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which established Swedish hegemony over Europe for nearly a century. When Queen Christina visited the mine in 1646, she said: “The greatness of the realm stands and falls with the copper mountain.”
For all the glory that the Kopparberg brought Sweden, mining conditions were appalling. Sulphurous smoke blacked the huts of Falun and killed off all plant life for miles around. The workers’ plight in the dark and sooty mines was so bad that a visitor in the 1700s wrote that “no theologian has ever been able to describe hell so frightfully.” In the early 19th century, as iron began replacing copper in importance, Stora Kopparberg turned away from the riches of the copper mountain and began the diversification that has kept it alive and thriving.
Lean at the Top. Under Managing Director Hakan Abenius, 60, a grave and quiet Swede who took over in 1948, the company is steadily branching out, has three plants abroad, and is now part of a consortium developing molybdenum deposits in Greenland. Last year Stora’s sales were about $153 million, are expected to rise slightly this year. Despite its advanced age, Stora has avoided hardening of the arteries by keeping its upper echelon lean (only 16% of its staff are salaried white-collar workers v. 25% for the average Swedish firm) and its plants remarkably efficient.
Stora has built so many specialized machines and invented so many processes that it derives a substantial income from 120 licensing agreements with foreign countries. Its most notable recent achievement was the development of the Kaldo steelmaking process, which rivals Austria’s famous LD process for making high-grade steel more quickly and efficiently.
No one knows exactly how old Stora is. The first documented reference to it dates from 1288, but archaeologists think that mining was going on long before that. Teams of Stora experts are employing spectroanalysis to determine the age of ancient copper objects that have been found in the old mine shafts. They may go back 1,000 years.
