PORTLAND — The Norwegian home heating company Jotul plans to expand its Maine-based manufacturing, moving production of its wood stoves to the company’s North American headquarters in Gorham.

Bret Watson, president and CEO of Jotul North America, said he expects the company will start manufacturing its first batches of wood stoves in Gorham early next year, hiring about seven new workers to handle a new assembly line for the stoves.

“The product is going to get even better and the labor rate differential is significant,” Watson said. “We’re about 45 percent of the labor rate in Norway.”

The company now imports those stoves from Norway at a rate of about 9,000 a year.

Watson said much of the engineering for the stoves has been done in Maine and that the manufacturing shift will help the company adapt more nimbly to new regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding wood stoves. The latest version of the new environmental standards are due to be released in February.

“We can more easily adapt to the new EPA standards because we’re building them here,” Watson said.

He said wood stoves make up about 70 percent of the 75-employee company’s business, with gas stoves making up the remainder.

Watson said the decision to move wood stove manufacturing to Maine followed an agreement between the company’s Stockholm, Sweden-based private equity owners Ratos AB and the Norwegian trade union representing workers there.

The Maine section of the company will eventually take on manufacturing for nine different wood-burning stove models, which Watson said will be phased in incrementally at the company’s 130,000-square-foot warehouse, where the company has two shifts in sheet metal production and one shift in stove assembly.

Watson said the company will likely begin the manufacturing transition by adding another assembly line to its assembly shift.

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