Biography | Ulf Widerström — The Year Cementgjuteriet Joined the A-List at Börshuset

The usual Skanska timeline treats 1965 as a rebrand year. The letters on the tape that year still said Skånska Cementgjuteriet.

Ulf Widerström became verkställande direktör in 1965, after Bo Jondal, and held the chair until 1977.

The same year the contractor was registered on Stockholmsbörsen's A-list. Skanska's own history page and the Swedish Wikipedia company article both date the listing to 1965. Neither publishes a trading-day stamp, so the pin is the year and the house.

Börshuset on the north side of Stortorget is where that market sat. Erik Palmstedt's building of 1773-1778 held the Stockholm exchange until 1998.

By 1965 Widerström had already spent twenty-three years inside the firm: avdelningschef from 1942, disponent from 1959, deputy managing director from 1963.

The promotion and the listing arrived together. One made him the public face of a contractor that was still named for a Scanian cement works. The other put that name on the main list in Gamla stan.

He later chaired the same board, 1977-1979, and from 1972 to 1977 he also chaired Svenska Byggnadsentreprenörföreningen, the contractors' association.

The building on Stortorget is no longer an exchange floor. The Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize Museum occupy it now.

A visitor looking for a ticker will not find one. The facade that faced the A-list listings is still Palmstedt's.

Photo: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons