Russia’s plywood exports to China fell 30 per cent year on year to 27,000 cubic metres in April 2026, whilst the average export price dropped 9 per cent month on month to US$540 per cubic metre, extending a run of double-digit contractions into the second quarter. That is according to China customs data obtained by Russian-based Lesprom Analytics, which comes as the fifth year of Chinese property contraction continues to drain demand from Russian mills.
The April price sat 6 per cent below the US$575 a cubic metre recorded in the same month last year, a reversal for mills that had still been selling at a premium only weeks earlier. China customs data put the average plywood price 12 per cent above its year-earlier benchmark as recently as March, when Russian log exports to China slipped 10 per cent, and plywood shipments slid 22 per cent.
The 30 per cent fall held even as April shipments ran ahead of an unusually thin March, leaving Russian mills squeezed on both volume and value in the one large market still open to them. Birch plywood, once shipped in volume into European furniture and construction supply chains, has not found a market of comparable scale in China, where buyers have favoured Nordic, Canadian and domestic panel supply since the EU sealed off a US$3 billion timber trade corridor in July 2022.
The April figures add to a broader collapse across Russia’s forest-products base, with NATO-frontline intelligence finding Russian timber and cellulose exports halved between 2021 and 2025, the steepest fall of any industrial sector tracked by Latvia’s Constitution Protection Bureau. The same assessment found Moscow’s so-called “friendly countries”, China among them, increasingly reluctant to deepen Russian trade for fear of Western secondary sanctions.
Official Chinese data has shown real estate investment down around 11 per cent year on year across the opening months of 2026, and new-home sales by floor area off about 14 per cent, with forecasters putting off a demand rebound before 2027. That leaves Russian plywood competing on price across a market now in its fifth year of contraction, with no outlet on the scale the EU once provided.
