Algerian wood-based panel manufacturer Ghamoud has commissioned the country’s first continuous particleboard line at El Eulma in Sétif province, producing its first board on 18 January off a 13-metre Dieffenbacher CPS+ press rated at 100,000 cubic metres a year. That is according to a Dieffenbacher project update, in which the German manufacturer and its Chinese subsidiary, Shanghai Wood-based Panel Machinery (SWPM), handed over the complete line more than six years after Ghamoud first placed the order in October 2019.
The CPS+ press is the centrepiece of a line that also covers flaking, drying, gluing, forming, raw board handling and sanding, with the plant sized to domestic Algerian demand rather than export volume. The commissioning extends Dieffenbacher’s North African pipeline of smaller-capacity lines for first-time panel manufacturers, and makes Ghamoud the second CPS+ running on the continent after Panneaux d’Algérie’s MDF line at El Tarf began continuous operation in 2022.
Owner and managing director Mohamed Ghamoud said the scaled-down specification matched the family-owned business’s budget discipline, describing the CPS+ as “the ideal entry-level system for newcomers like us” in the wood-based panel market.
Dieffenbacher area sales director Didier Goesaert, who led commissioning alongside subproject manager Sabir Ouchen and Ghamoud technical director Fares Messekher, said the family had pushed the build through repeated project setbacks. The installation phase began only in the first quarter of 2024, after COVID-era supply-chain disruptions delayed the original 2019 order, as Wood Based Panels International reported in early 2024.
The start-up serves an Algerian panel market that has historically relied on imports, with Panneaux d’Algérie’s MDF launch at El Tarf in 2022 and the Ghamoud particleboard line now providing domestic continuous capacity in both particleboard and MDF.
Dieffenbacher’s installed African CPS+ base now runs to three lines across Algeria and Egypt, with Nile Wood’s 32.4-metre press at Sadat City — commissioned in 2025 for the Egypt Kuwait Holding subsidiary — joining the Ghamoud and Panneaux d’Algérie plants in a North African order book the German manufacturer has built since its first Algerian win in 2018.
