Having just spent 10 days in Malaysia on its timber sector “familiarisation programme”, I can’t deny this job has its perks.
The trip, organised for journalists from around the world by the Malaysian Timber Council (MTC), was fascinating. It showed us the full spectrum of the industry; from large-scale sawn timber, door, flooring, mouldings and plywood producers, to a back country charcoal business. It also included trips to Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme accredited forests, to check out logging and chain of custody procedures, and to sustainably-managed Mangrove swamps, where, I confess, my man-at-M&S tropical outfit prompted some deserved sledging from the New Zealander in our group.
But perhaps the most impactful part of the visit was a day spent at the MTC Global WoodMart show in Kuala Lumpur. At 108 exhibitors and 2,046 visitors, it wasn’t the biggest trade fair ever. But this was the inaugural event and, what it lacked in size, it made up for in buzz and the insight it gave into the way the international trade is developing. Notably it highlighted that this is becoming an increasingly integrated global market and that, as economies expand and evolve, old divisions between timber producers and buyers are being consigned to history.
Malaysia, the WoodMart underlined, has already taken major strides away from being simply a source of tropical timber, to not only a multifaceted wood products supplier – with increased output of engineered timber among the next items on its to do list – but also a developing market for manufactured goods from elsewhere.
The show not only attracted buyers from around the world, but also a significant number of overseas exhibitors aiming to sell timber and wood products to Malaysian visitors and those from elsewhere in South-east Asia.
As one UK exhibitor commented, this was a truly international buying and selling opportunity. And, according to the opening address from Malaysian plantations and commodities minister Tan Sri Bernard Dompok, it heralded more such opportunity ahead, with global timber trading patterns set to change even more rapidly in the future. Malaysia, for instance, aims to increase timber sector export earnings by 150% to US$17bn in 10 years and to reverse the industry’s current 60/40 split of overseas sales between ‘commodity’ and value-added wood products. Combined with the ceiling on its own timber harvest imposed by tougher environmental regulation, this means it will be shipping in significantly more than the US$640m of timber it imported last year.
The rising affluence of Malaysian consumers is also likely to drive up the volume and variety of wood product imports. And among the WoodMart exhibitors banking on this were New Zealand suppliers of engineered and solid radiata pine construction systems.
MTC chief executive Cheam Kam Huan also saw the global profile of exhibitors and visitors giving the event potential to be a forum for international collaboration in wood promotion.
The MTC also co-hosted a conference on “timber legality in the global market” the day before the show. As expected at such an event, the acronyms of the various certification and wood legality schemes flew thick and fast and, in an aside to me, one delegate said that what timber promotion in an ever more globalised market needed above all was “a far simpler environmental language”. Maybe a topic for debate at the next Global WoodMart in 2012.
