SR Timber’s strong supply chains have ensured that its supply of products – including its flagship Premium Gold roofing batten – has remained unaffected over the last 12 months, despite increasing global demand for timber.
This ability to reassure the market has been particularly necessary for certain sections of the housebuilding industry, such as roofing, which has been experiencing a crippling shortage of supplies and raw materials such as concrete roofing tiles. This has been especially important at a time when global demand for timber is skyrocketing and countries such as China and the US have been clamouring for as much raw material as they can get their hands on.
The strength of these supply chain relationships has been exemplified during the poor winter months, when parts of the Baltics have experienced flooding, rather than the usual snow and ice. The flooding has made forests inaccessible for the plant machinery to fell trees and for heavy goods vehicles to get the logs from the forests to the sawmills.
Our priority will continue to be ensuring the robustness of our relationships with the sawmills in the Baltic states, and this is the reason we are confident in our ability to continue processing and delivering orders within 48 hours well into 2018.
The rising costs right through the supply chain, on everything from raw materials to fuel and transportation, will continue to challenge businesses like ours this year. Our position as one of the UK’s leading importers of timber products doesn’t make us immune, but it certainly doesn’t expose us to some of the wild prices we have seen in the market.
The issue of quality is an obvious and important point to make. Our strong supplier relationships ensure that the quality of materials doesn’t deviate from standards such as BS 5534 for graded batten.
We have come across a few instances recently, including feedback at a trade show for the roofing industry that highlighted that myths persist around the quality of roofing batten. It’s been a good opportunity to revive awareness of our Guide to Graded Roofing Battens, which covers fundamental points such as the sizes and positions of knots, as well as the slope of the grain.
Another myth that seems to persist is about which part of a log is suitable as a roofing batten. We know that Jim Coulson from TFT Woodexperts Ltd issued a strong rebuttal explaining that there’s no justification for the claim that sideboards are the best part of the log to make roofing batten from. And while he was at it, he debunked the myth that batten should be kiln dried.
While timber batten is our flagship product and what most people know us for, our other product ranges have really come to the fore in the last 12 months.
We launched a machined panels division at the start of 2017, offering three core products: softwood and hardwood panels, worktops, and tongue-and-groove matchboards. The new collections are aimed at bespoke kitchen and furniture manufacturers and the growth from a standing start has been very good – the division has even taken on more staff to cope with demand.
The same can be said for sales of our scaffold boards, which have more than held their own. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that we get permission from a major film studio to do a case study about the use of our scaffold boards.
Our western red cedar shingles proved to be the star of the show at a recent trade exhibition – largely because we had the room to have a rig that displayed them properly.
Challenges will persist but we have every reason to remain confident about how 2018 will shape up because we have a business built on strong relationships with suppliers that can supply an abundance of quality materials.
