Australia spent more than $3 billion last year on importing wood products with China alone responsible for supplying $1.318 billion, 43.8 per cent of all products, a figure that is more than the next four countries combined and 9.1 per cent higher than the year before. That is according to new data obtained by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and analysed by Tim Woods, Managing Director of IndustryEdge, whose country-by-country and product-by-product breakdown measures every figure on an AUD cif basis, reflecting the landed cost in Australia inclusive of freight and insurance.
Plywood, LVL and glulam was the single largest product category at $792.8 million, accounting for 26.3 per cent of total imports, followed by builders joinery at $562.4 million and sawnwood at $556.4 million, with those three groupings alone accounting for close to 64 per cent of Australia’s entire wood products import spend for the year and each representing a category that Australian plantation fibre has the raw capacity to produce domestically.
New Zealand was the second-largest source nation at $302.9 million, followed by Indonesia at $289.4 million and Malaysia at $180.4 million, though Finland recorded the sharpest year-on-year growth of any top-ten supplier, lifting 38 per cent on the prior calendar year to reach $80.1 million.
Across both the country distribution and the product breakdown, the ABS data reinforces a pattern Woods has documented across multiple import categories, with Australia’s 12-month plywood import volume crossing 500,000 cubic metres for the first time in January 2026, a 21.8 per cent uplift on the prior corresponding period, with January itself recording the highest single-month volume ever measured despite sitting among the quietest months in the Australian trade calendar.
“Australia is great at making its own future precisely because, where possible, it has exercised strategic self-sufficiency. What could be more strategic than growing the fibre and turning it into the dwellings we need, to sustain our own population?” Woods said. “Accepting the work is hard, there are risks, the efforts must be collective, and there is urgency. Australia can manufacture the sustainable, timber-based building products it needs to ensure a future we should all prefer: one made in Australia, to meet domestic needs.”
Woods said the $3.011 billion import bill represents a strategic question Australia can no longer defer, with the nation exporting its raw timber whilst paying other countries to manufacture the structural building products a housing-short nation urgently needs.
