Until this June, the exploitation of state forest was outsourced to 27 private companies based on 20-year licence agreements signed in 1996, which were generally seen as generous to the licence holders.

The change was prompted by the massive ice storm of early 2014, which severely damaged forests and required an emergency harvest of over nine million cubic metres of wood.

The initial idea floated in the aftermath of the ice storm did not take off and was bogged down in a political acrimony.

Among the main concerns was the fear that yet another state-owned company would become a hotbed of political staffing.

The system was finally put in place in 2015, when the time started approaching to either renew the licences or create a new system.

Slovenian State Forests, based in the town of Kočevje in south-east, will start off with capital of 20 million euros, roughly the equivalent of what the state got from licence holders each year, and 38 workers from the National Farmland and Forest Fund, which has so far been in charge of state forests.

The money will be used to buy offices, establish at least four logistics centres around the country and purchase administrative and logging equipment and hire an additional 109 people.

The company is in the midst of signing contracts with logging firms for individual sites, said Miha Marenče, the company's acting director general. It has also invited trading companies to bid for roundwood.

The company's kick-off is likely to be turbulent, as the lack of workers has led to fears among wood-processing companies that they will not have enough wood in the initial stages.

Forestry experts, meanwhile, fear any delays in logging could aggravate the damage by bark beetle, which has been spreading rapidly, in particular in forests affected by the ice storm.

Some of these issues are to be addressed at a debate in Kočevje on Friday.

Once the new system is fully up and running, it is expected that forest exploitation will become more profitable for the state, which hopes the company will generate sales of 50 million euros a year by harvesting about a million cubic metres of wood.

The state owns 254,600 hectares of forest. State forests are typically in large patches, which makes exploitation more economical than harvesting woods in small private forest lots, whose size averages 2.5 hectares.

The growing stock of Slovenian forests is estimated at 337 million cubic metres, with annual accrual of eight million cubic metres.

Annual harvest averaged four million cubic metres before the February 2014 ice storm, which led to a surge in harvesting to over six million cubic metres that year and in 2015.

With 58% of its territory covered in forests, Slovenia is the third most heavily forested country in the EU, only behind Sweden and Finland.

Seventy percent of Slovenia's forests are beech, beech-fir and beech-oak forests, whose growth capacity is relatively high.