Japanese-owned builders started just under 30 per cent of the homes delivered by Australia’s 20 largest builders last year, and now Japan’s timber exporters are following them in, with the Japan Wood-Products Export Association bringing four of the country’s top suppliers of sugi and hinoki to Melbourne next month.
“It is risky to rely on only a few lumber-exporting countries,” Hisao Yamada said in 2024, with the association’s chairman, a former Forestry Agency technical official, opening the seminar with its Japanese keynote. Japan sent 53 per cent of a record ¥59.6 billion in wood exports to China last year, and Australia bought 96 million of it, eighteenth on the Forestry Agency’s buyer table.
Sumitomo Forestry alone was responsible for 7,311 of those starts, or 18 per cent, with Metricon first on the ranking for a tenth straight year at 4,015. Its Australian builders grew profit 72 per cent to 19.7 billion yen in the six months to June, the only housing market in the group where profit rose.
Obayashi is weeks from owning Multiplex outright after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found the takeover unlikely to substantially lessen competition in any market, with the share transfer scheduled for 30 September. Kajima has controlled Melbourne builder Icon since 2005, and Icon built the T3 Collingwood tower that hosts the seminar from more than 2,000 cubic metres of cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber.
Sugi and hinoki are “the most widely planted and utilized species” in Japan, the program states, and hinoki columns from the Osaka Expo’s 27,000-cubic-metre Grand Ring are already bound for benches and fittings in Kochi’s civic spaces as the colonnade comes down. Processed, dried sugi sells for 19,000 yen below hinoki on a 10.5 by 10.5-centimetre, three-metre piece, according to Agriculture Ministry data, and 54 per cent of the 2.6-million-hectare hinoki estate is over 51 years old.
Akasho Sangyo, of Yoshino in Nara Prefecture, brings a laminated timber product it calls the W-Block, and Akai Seizaisyo brings JAS-certified large-section solid timber cut from large-diameter sugi and hinoki logs. Higo Mokuzai has run log and lumber markets in Kyushu since 1958 for a 1,000-strong network of sawmills and merchants, while OI Innovation, a sawmill-machinery maker, sources appearance-grade timber through partner mills across Japan.
The Basic Plan approved by Cabinet in June commits Japan to seven million more cubic metres of its own wood by 2035, four million of which will displace imports. Lumber sales are to rise from 7.4 billion yen in 2024 to 85 billion by 2030 under the Agriculture Ministry’s export expansion strategy, with 55.4 billion of it assigned to the United States.
Andrew Dunn, the Timber Development Association’s chief executive, gives the Australian keynote on demand, specification, and supply of imported softwood and engineered timber, in the slot between Yamada and the break. Hinoki two-by-fours won American Lumber Standard Committee approval in April 2024 and sugi followed twelve months later, after strength testing at Oregon State University that Yamada’s association ran.
Wood Central is organising the seminar for the association and the Japan International Forestry Promotion and Cooperation Center, which present it, five months after Takaichi Sanae listed forestry among the four export sectors Tokyo wants to grow with Australia. JIFPRO’s Shigeru Takahara moderates, and Keiichiro Sato, Anton Kabanov, Masashi Suzuki, and Yusuke Hisadomi present for the four companies after the break, in Japanese with consecutive English interpretation and questions after every session.
The seminar runs in the Penthouse of a tower the Australian Institute of Architects named Victoria’s best commercial project, with timber importers, frame and truss fabricators, architects, and Japanese-owned builders operating in Australia on the invitation list. Invitations for the 40 in-person places are open through Wood Central, with a networking reception closing the day.
“A shift from log-centred exports to high-value wood products such as lumber and plywood, and the opening of new export destinations,” the strategy states in its final May 2025 revision, under a Cabinet target of 166 billion yen in forest-product exports by 2030, up from 73.5 billion last year.
- To find out more about the seminar and to register your interest, contact Jason Ross at Wood Central on jason@woodcentral.com.au.
