How will the supply of sawlogs in China develop next year, when Russia stops exporting logs?<\/p>\n
The largest log supplier to China is New Zealand right now. New Zealand is nearing the peak of its harvest and its harvest level will start to drop in the next five years. Some analysts say maybe not for another 10 years, but there's probably no more substantial increase available in the New Zealand harvest.<\/p>\n
The second largest supplier is Europe, Germany, Czech Republic, a little bit of Austria. There is due to the bark beetle problem that has allowed for the export of huge surplus volumes until the middle of 2021. The Central European industry is now needing more of their own logs to feed its own domestic sawmills because there's a lot more capacity built up, especially in Germany but also in the Czech Republic. Less of that beetle-killed log supply will be exported, and it is expected a slow reduction in supply from Europe of beetle logs to China.<\/p>\n
And then the third largest supplier was Australia that has a log export ban in China that seems to stay in place.<\/p>\n
Then the 4th largest exporter was the U.S. which now has problems with the pinewood pest that's restricting shipments of southern yellow pine and even some West Coast species could be impacted. But because of the requirement for fumigation or heat treating, it has caused southern yellow pine log exports to essentially cease.<\/p>\n
Also there are some smaller players like Uruguay and Brazil and so forth.<\/p>\n
However it appears to be no sustainable long-term log supply for China which means there will likely be a log supply crisis in the next five years in China.<\/p>\n
This means that China will need to look at more imported lumber which may happen, but that means that the Chinese must pay higher (closer to global) prices to get more lumber.<\/p>\n
China could consider more domestic species if it can get access to any volumes.<\/p>\n
There's a big change for sawmills coming in China, but this assumes that wood consumption stays at least sideways or doesn't decrease.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How will the supply of sawlogs in China develop next year, when Russia stops exporting logs? The largest log supplier to China is New Zealand right now. New Zealand is nearing the peak of its harvest and its harvest level … Continue reading