Company history
Raute 114 years
A listed company’s history from its founding to today
Raute Corporation is today one of the world’s leading suppliers of plywood machinery, equipment and complete mills. Raute has shaped the whole industry, but its roots run much deeper than plywood.
The book is available as a PDF on Raute’s website.
- Client
- Raute Corporation
- Published
- 2022
- The writer
- Sane Keskiaho
- Design
- Antti Grundsten
- Interviews
- Around 30
The story
The company’s history began early last century, when the industrialist Mr P. Kuivalainen together with Mr S. Huotari and Mr K. A. Kylänen founded an engineering workshop in Lahti in 1906 for “repairs of all kinds”, in the empty buildings of a “splint factory” that had made match blanks.
The work
114 years of iron and everyday work
“Buildings, machines and products are only the dead surroundings to which the people working among them give life,” said Aarne Mustakallio, managing director of Lahden Rautateollisuus, in his 40th anniversary speech in 1948.
Raute wanted to capture the stories of employees with long careers at the company while it was still possible. Not every story fitted into the book, but the recordings and transcripts were archived.
The book is divided into six parts: the first decades, the years of war and war reparations, the development of Soviet and domestic trade, internationalisation, Lahden Vaaka, and the era of digitalisation and automation.
About thirty people were interviewed for the book, most of them retired Raute employees. The interviews, Henrik Schwartzberg’s personal letters, the memories of the Mustakallio (formerly Schwartzberg) family and treasures found in the National Archives gave the book its depth. The telling was deliberately kept close to storytelling.
In the client’s words
“Sane wrote a narrative history of our family company covering its 114 years from the founding to the present day. The book offers an interesting look at how our company developed, at the significant events and at the key people over the years.”
