Plywood mills across China shipped 7.883 million cubic metres abroad in the first half of 2026, 21 per cent more than a year earlier, and earned US$2.646 billion for it, up just 5 per cent, with Myanmar the largest buyer after a 1,708 per cent surge and Australia third at 426,000 cubic metres. That is according to China Customs figures carried in the International Tropical Timber Organization’s report for the second half of August, with the Yokohama-based body counting more than 5,010 plywood plants holding 246 million cubic metres of annual capacity at the end of 2025, 11 per cent more than a year earlier.
“China has sufficient plywood production capacity to meet domestic demand, and thus there is no need to import plywood,” the report states, with imports falling 27 per cent to 138,000 cubic metres over the same six months and Russia supplying 87 per cent of them, leaving 57 cubic metres shipped out for every one brought in on Wood Central’s arithmetic.
It comes as Chinese entities signed $128.4 billion of construction contracts across every sector of the Belt and Road’s 150 member countries in 2025, 81 per cent more than in 2024 and the initiative’s biggest year on the Griffith Asia Institute’s count, taking cumulative engagement since 2013 to $1.399 trillion, with Africa and Central Asia the two largest destinations.
Private companies drove last year’s investment rather than the state, Christoph Nedopil found, with the Griffith Asia Institute director in Brisbane naming East Hope Group, Xinfa Group, and Longi Green Energy among the largest, and leaving construction to state-owned enterprises.
Wood Central asked at the third Belt and Road Forum in October 2023 whether Beijing’s grip on the world’s forest products would hold, with 30.5 per cent of the world’s forests inside BRI countries and 41 million cubic metres of logs and sawn wood arriving in China in 2021, and the grip has held while the direction of the trade reversed.
China’s log imports fell for a fourth straight year in 2025, Papua New Guinea down 23 per cent and the Solomon Islands down 31, and its mills took 15.876 million cubic metres of logs and 10.66 million of lumber over the first half of this year, the lumber trade down 12 per cent with softwood carrying almost all of the fall.
Myanmar’s 836,000 cubic metres arrived on low border-trade costs, the tariff benefits of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and the convenience of cross-border yuan settlement, according to analysts ITTO cites, into a country with little plywood capacity of its own and a timber export trade worth $19.11 million a year.
The Philippines took 526,000 cubic metres, the United Kingdom 412,000, and Nigeria 363,000, while shipments to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates fell 32 and 38 per cent and the United States took 33 per cent less at 74,008 cubic metres, after Commerce set an 187.27 per cent antidumping margin on Chinese hardwood and decorative plywood.
Australia bought 55 per cent more Chinese plywood in the half at 426,000 cubic metres, worth $245 million, and 256 per cent more Chinese particleboard, into a market where the industry says Russian fibre is already arriving under a Chinese label.
Up to 100,000 cubic metres of wood containing Russian material reach Australia each year on the Australian Forest Products Association’s estimate, enough for 15,000 homes, with logs peeled and glued into laminated veneer lumber in China arriving as Chinese product under the country-of-origin rule, and Tony Pasin has asked the Albanese Government to “close the loophole for all timber products containing Russian materials being rerouted into Australia”, with the Shadow Minister Assisting for Fisheries and Forestry putting the motion to the House on the first of seven sitting Mondays.
In Africa, the belt still runs inward, with China taking 39.5 per cent of Gabon’s wood exports in 2023 and returning to the Okoumé market this year as European compliance costs push producers east, Okoumé logs landing in China at $481 a cubic metre in June, up from $445 in May.
“In Solomon Islands, forest coverage is around 90%, and most of the country’s revenue comes from logging, with limited development of downstream products,” Christina Gabuvai said, with the chief forester among eleven officers Beijing trained for two months last year and Australia since answering with training at a Kolombangara plantation its own money helped New Forests buy.
The property market that once pulled those logs in is in its sixth year of contraction, with real estate investment down 19.2 per cent to 4,300.9 billion yuan through July and sales 65 per cent below their 2020 peak, and the analysts ITTO cites do not expect it to stabilise before 2027.
