Biography | Rudolf Fredrik Berg — The Limhamn Spin-Off That Became Skanska

Skanska likes to say the firm began in a cellar in Limhamn. The legal fact is plainer.

In 1887 Rudolf Fredrik Berg spun AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet out of Skånska Cement AB, the company he had managed from Lomma since 1873.

The parent firm was raising a new cement plant at Limhamn, next to the limestone it already owned. The daughter company was not meant to burn more clinker. It was meant to make things out of cement — pipes, slabs, ornaments, later bridges — and to sell the idea of concrete to a country that still built in brick and timber.

The same year the new firm poured what Skanska still calls Sweden’s first concrete bridge. Scepticism about the material was the point of the exercise.

Berg remained disponent of the cement company. He took the managing-director title at Cementgjuteriet later; Svenskt biografiskt lexikon dates that appointment to 27 April 1895.

Henrik Holmberg, a Visby-trained engineer, ran the casting firm from the start. Berg’s name is on the founding, not on the day-to-day books.

By the time Berg died in 1907 the spin-off employed more than a thousand people and had already taken work in Britain, Finland and Russia. The name Skanska arrived only in 1984.

The factory buildings that once lined this harbour have been pulled down for housing. The limestone pit inland is a nature reserve. The visitor is standing on the industrial shoreline that made the spin-off possible, not inside the cellar of the origin story.

Photo: unknown photographer, before 1907, public domain, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon via Wikimedia Commons.