Three major destinations of wood products are China, Korea and Taiwan. By items, logs and lumber take majority. In volume, logs are 521,222 cubic metres, 96.9% up and lumber is 67,647 cubic metres, 13.9% up. Growth of log export is conspicuous. Compared to 2010, lumber increase is 13.8% but log export increased by eight times.
The government drew up the plan of forest products export in 2013. It says target by 2020 is 25 billion yen ($210 million), which is double of actual result of 2012 of 12.3 billion yen ($103 million). Actual result in last two years advanced largely and achieving the target seems easy as long as the yen stays weak.
Three major markets are China, Taiwan and Korea, which take 65% in total export with value of 11.6 billion yen ($97 million),
77.5% up from 2013, out of which logs are 6.8 billion yen ($57 million), 119.6% up and lumber is 3.1 billion yen ($26 million), 17.6% up. In volume, logs are 521,000 cubic metres, 96.9% up and lumber is 67,000 cubic metres, 13.0% up. Compared to 2010, log export increased by about eight times.
The largest market is China. Logs for China is 312,000 cubic metres, 140.9% up and lumber is 35,000 cubic metres, 57.8% up. Up until 2012, log export to China was less than for Korea and Taiwan then it sharply increased since 2013. Korea took 98,000 cubic metres of logs, 97.1% up and 7,000 cubic metres of lumber, 22.6% up.
Log export to Korea almost doubled. Taiwan took 107,000M cubic metres of logs, 31% up. Type of logs for export is mainly class C logs including class B. In
China, logs are used for engineering works and crating.
In Korea, Japanese cypress is popular for interior finishing then since last year export of fir logs started.
The weak yen helps expanding export of class C logs but in Japan, increasing biomass power generation facilities use class C logs for fuel so there is competition.
Japan’s share of log import for China is only 0.2% so there is a chance of large growth in the future.
