Biography|Henrik Holmberg — First Managing Director of the Firm That Became Skanska

Rudolf Fredrik Berg founded AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet in 1887 as a spin-off from Skånska Cement AB.

The point of the new company was not more cement. It was to make things out of cement — pipes, slabs, ornaments, and, soon, bridges — and to teach a country that still built in brick and timber what the material could do.

Henrik Holmberg was the man put in to run it.

The 1897 officer register of Väg- och vattenbyggnadskåren lists him as chief engineer and disponent of Skånska Cementgjuteriet from 1886 to 1894. Later managing-director lists for the firm that took the name Skanska in 1984 put him first, from the incorporation year 1887 until 1894.

The work sat on the Öresund side of Malmö. A casting plant had already gone up on Citadellskajen in 1884. In 1887 the company’s centre of gravity moved with Berg’s new cement works toward Limhamn, then a fishing village being rebuilt as an industrial town. The ground under today’s Limhamns sjöstad is that yard.

Holmberg was a road-and-water engineer, not a chemist. Berg remained the public face and the inventor in the basement. Holmberg’s job was to turn a product experiment into a contractor.

In 1887 the firm built Jordbergabron, later described as Sweden’s first cement bridge. In 1892 it took a water-and-sewer contract in Östersund. By the time Holmberg left in 1894 the company had a Malmö headquarters and a trade that would, two decades later, move its head office to Stockholm.

The 1903 photograph of the Malmö works still circulating is later than his tenure. The address is not. This is where the first managing director of that contractor did the job.

Photo: Skånska Cementgjuteriet works, Malmö, August 1903, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons