Forestry contractors have doubled their share of work in Swedish forests since the 1990s and have thus become important actors in the industry's supply chain. Yet, their profitability has often been low. It is essential for a firm's success to have a well-functioning business model. Therefore, the aim of this study was to characterize business models currently used by forestry contractors and identify differences in the contractors' financial performance in relation to a chosen business model. A survey was sent to all limited liability companies in northern Sweden that were registered to carry out logging or silviculture. One hundred and ninety-eight contractors responded, and their financial performance was analysed based on information in financial statements. The study highlights that there are clear differences both within and between contractor categories in relation to several business model components, as well as their financial performance. Logging contractors had the lowest profitability, measured as return on assets, and also a lower solidity and liquidity compared to silvicultural and mixed service contractors. The largest logging contractors tended to have a better and more stable profitability than small ones, although the differences were small and varied between years. However, a negative trend in profitability was identified for all contractor groups.

Increasing demands to harvesting production and quality require improved management practices. This study's purpose was to analyze the impact of industrial context on procurement, management, and development of harvesting services. Using interviews, functions were modeled at two forest owners associations (FOAs) with outsourced harvesting services. One FOA had its own sawmills, requiring frequent harvesting production adjustments to meet varying volume demand in the short-term. The long-term uncertainty was however low because of good visibility of future demand (>6 months). The other FOA did not own mills and produced wood according to fixed six-month delivery contracts. This meant few short-term production adjustments, but long-term uncertainty due to low visibility of future demand. Demand uncertainty resulted in corresponding needs for harvesting capacity flexibility. This could have been met by a corresponding proportion of short-term contracts for capacity. In this study, however, a large proportion (>90%) of long-term contracts was found, motivated by a perceived contractor shortage. It was also noted that although contractor investment cycles (4-6 years) matched the FOAs' strategic horizons (3-5 years), contractors' investment plans were not considered in the FOAs' strategic planning. The study concludes with a characterization of different FOA contexts and their corresponding needs for capacity flexibility.

Forestry service contractors' performance have been found related to how they organize their business. For benchmarking purposes, it is thus of vital importance to have a tool that can capture the relevant characteristics of a firm's business model and structure the information in a useful way. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a well-established tool that has frequently been used to describe business models in other industries than forestry. Thus, the aim of this paper was to identify which of the BMC components are the most relevant when comparing business models applied by forestry service contractors and provide a framework for characterizing their business models in a structured and comparable manner. The research process also identified which questions are critical to capturing the relevant content of the included business model components. The adapted framework was tested by interviewing forestry service market experts in Sweden, Finland, Scotland and Ireland about the business model characteristics in their respective countries. The result was a seven-component BMC framework with a number of key questions associated to each component. The paper concludes that the proposed canvas framework is a structured and practical approach for characterizing business models applied by forestry service contractors.

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