BrasPine has spent 23 years in Brazil's Paran\u00e1 state turning pine logs into finished timber products. Now the company is taking that model across the border. Uruguay's Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining, Fernanda Cardona, confirmed last month that BrasPine will invest US$250 million to build its first plant outside Brazil \u2014 a forest-products operation in Rivera, in the country's north, that will convert locally grown pine into higher-value goods for export.<\/p>\n
The scale of the commitment becomes clearer when you add the land. A firm linked to BrasPine's directors acquired approximately 18,800 hectares in Rivera and Tacuaremb\u00f3 from the Bosques del Uruguay trust between late 2025 and early 2026, paying around $171.3 million \u2014 roughly $9,000 per hectare. Before a single board has been processed in Uruguay, the company and its associates have put over $420 million on the table.<\/p>\n
Mill, sawdust, and surplus power<\/strong><\/p>\n Civil construction begins in June 2026, following the completion of earthworks at the Rivera site. BrasPine director Giovani Giacomet describes the first phase as a pine sawmill with power cogeneration and a remanufacturing line \u2014 the same integrated model the company runs in Paran\u00e1. Production is targeted for the second half of 2027, with 150 jobs at first phase rising to more than 400 at full development.<\/p>\n The plant will not be producing commodity lumber. The stated intention is to convert Uruguayan pine into remanufactured, higher-value goods bound for Brazil, the United States, Europe, and Asia \u2014 finished products rather than logs or green lumber, which is where Uruguay has historically stopped.<\/p>\n Energy proved central enough to the negotiations that state utility UTE joined the talks. The government is now drafting a decree to regulate how cogenerators like BrasPine feed surplus electricity into the national grid \u2014 a detail Cardona described as a milestone for the sector.<\/p>\n On the Brazilian border, by design<\/strong><\/p>\n Rivera sits in Uruguay's north, directly on the border with Brazil \u2014 not incidental for a company making its first move outside Paran\u00e1. But BrasPine also cited the region's established forestry workforce, available energy infrastructure, and confidence in Uruguay's institutional environment. The project secured promoted status from investment commission COMAP in December 2025, qualifying it for fiscal benefits under Uruguay's investment-promotion law. President Yamand\u00fa Orsi, who led the government work that brought the deal together, is expected at the official launch.<\/p>\n A shrinking pine estate meets a large new buyer<\/strong><\/p>\n Uruguay's pine estate has contracted sharply \u2014 from 185,000 hectares in 2011 to 128,497 hectares in 2024. The land acquisition secures BrasPine's own fibre supply, but the arrival of a large long-term buyer in the region changes the investment calculus for anyone else considering pine plantations in the north. Growers who sat on the fence now have an off-take to underwrite the decision.<\/p>\n Uruguay built its modern forestry sector on the 1987 Forestry Law and successive pulp-mill investments along the Uruguay River \u2014 Botnia\/UPM, Montes del Plata, UPM's second mill. Those bets made the country one of the world's most significant pulp exporters relative to its size, and forestry has since overtaken beef as the leading export earner. The softwood processing side never kept pace. The pine estate in the north has historically fed lower-value export products. BrasPine is the first operator to arrive with the ambition and the capital to change that.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n