Tag: ITTO

Tropical hardwood’s long-held status as the prime material for European fresh and seawater marine applications has been increasingly challenged by alternatives; steel, concrete, recycled plastics, wood-plastic composites, temperate timber species and increasingly, for sea defences, rock armour.

A major structural change is underway in the African timber industry as operations are reoriented away from the European market towards Asian markets. This change is driven by factors both on the supply-side, particularly declining availability of timber species of interest to the European market; and on the demand-side as consumption is weakening in Europe at a time when demand in Asia is rising rapidly.

Latest reports on European economic and construction sector health and outlook make for almost exclusively positive reading.  After the EU economy enjoyed its strongest growth in gross domestic product in a decade in 2017, the overviews and forecasts for the first part of 2018 state that not only has expansion continued to date, it is set to persist through the rest of the year and into 2019.

There was only very slow growth in both the EU wood furniture and joinery sectors during 2017.  While production and consumption gained momentum in parts of continental Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, this was offset by a significant slowdown in the UK and stasis in Germany.

Drawing on interviews with timber trade associations across the region, the latest newsletter of the European Timber Trade Federation (soon to be published at http://www.ettf.info/ettf_news) shows that the European timber market continues to grow slowly and broadly in line with GDP forecasts of 2.4% in 2018 and 2.3% and 2% in 2019. It also highlights that trade growth is becoming more widespread and resilient in southern European countries, including in Italy, Spain and Greece.

The European plywood market faces a combination of buoyant demand, mounting competition for product from other leading consumer countries, plus persistent supply delays and constraints among key producers, notably  tropical suppliers.

The slowdown in EU imports of tropical products, which began in 2016 and continued throughout last year, levelled off in the first quarter of 2018. Chart 1 shows twelve monthly rolling average imports (to iron out seasonal fluctuations) into the EU of all tropical wood products listed in HS Chapter 44 (excluding wood waste and chips). It shows that imports peaked at an average of 224,000 metric tonnes (MT) per month in September 2016, slipped to a low of 207,000 MT in January this year and recovered only slightly, to 209,000 MT, by March 2018 (Chart 1).

One prized commodity has been the object of log export protests on the Champs Élysées, a free trade legal challenge by the EU to the Ukraine and a packed recent European conference in London. That commodity is European oak.

EU imports of “continuously shaped” wood (HS code 4409) includes both decking products and interior decorative products like moulded skirting and beading. Total EU imports of hardwood products under this heading declined by just over 3% in 2017, to 122,800 metric tonnes (MT). However, imports from Indonesia and Brazil, the two largest suppliers, increased last year.

There was plenty of tropical wood furniture to be found at the first two big European furniture exhibitions of 2018 – the IMM interiors fair in Cologne, Germany (IMM-Cologne), and the January Furniture Show at the NEC in Birmingham, UK (JFS-Birmingham).