China's timber import figures for the first half of 2026 are now in, and they tell a story of a market that spent most of the period contracting before staging an unexpectedly forceful rebound in June.<\/p>\n
Customs data show combined imports of logs and lumber reached 26.534m cubic metres between January and June, down 8 per cent from the same period last year. Logs accounted for 15.876m cubic metres of that total, a decline of 5.4 per cent, while lumber imports fell more sharply, down 11.4 per cent to 10.658m cubic metres.<\/p>\n
A rocky first quarter gives way to recovery<\/strong><\/p>\n The quarterly breakdown makes clear just how uneven the first half was. Total imports in the first quarter came to 12.18m cubic metres, down a steep 12.4 per cent year-on-year \u2014 a figure that set the tone for what looked, at the time, like a deepening slowdown.<\/p>\n The second quarter told a more complicated story. April imports came in at 4.865m cubic metres, still down 6.8 per cent from a year earlier but up 4 per cent on the previous month, an early sign that the worst might be passing. May then reversed course, with soft downstream demand dragging imports down to 4.402m cubic metres. It was June that changed the narrative: imports jumped to 5.086m cubic metres, prompting many in the industry to conclude that underlying demand had likely bottomed out back in the first quarter.<\/p>\n June's rebound sets a new high for the year<\/strong><\/p>\n What stands out most is the scale of June's turnaround. Imports rose 15.5 per cent from May and 7.5 per cent from a year earlier, marking the strongest single month of the year so far \u2014 and the rebound was driven almost entirely by logs rather than processed timber.<\/p>\n Log imports climbed 11.1 per cent year-on-year in June and surged 21.9 per cent from the previous month. Lumber imports also improved, though far more modestly, rising 2 per cent year-on-year and 6.6 per cent month-on-month. Both categories hit their highest monthly levels of the year, offering the clearest signal yet that China's timber market may be turning a corner after a difficult start to 2026.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China’s timber import figures for the first half of 2026 are now in, and they tell a story of a market that spent most of the period contracting before staging an unexpectedly forceful rebound in June.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99361,"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-99360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n