Ukraine’s ten biggest woodworking exporters shipped 8.7 billion hryvnia (US$194 million) of wood products in 2025, keeping the trade moving through a fourth year of full-scale war and the rolling blackouts that came with it. That is according to YC.Market, the research arm of Kyiv business data platform YouControl, whose new study of the sector’s export leaders was first reported by Komersant Ukrainian.
First place belongs to Barlinek Invest, the Vinnytsia flooring plant owned by Poland’s Barlinek Group, which shipped 1.9 billion hryvnia ($42 million) of product for 21.2 per cent of the ten-company total. The Ukrainian operation has been in operation since 2007 and now supplies 40 per cent of the 12 million square metres of engineered flooring the group sells in 75 countries each year.
Second place went to Odek Ukraine, the Orzhiv mill cutting 115,000 cubic metres of birch plywood a year, half the country’s entire output, with its 1.6 billion hryvnia ($36 million) in exports, a third more than the 1.2 billion hryvnia ($27 million) booked by third-placed Rezalt Ukraine. Nine of the 10 companies turned a profit last year, banking combined revenue of 13.8 billion hryvnia ($308 million).
Timber’s top ten out-exported the leading pulp and paper companies four times over, though the metallurgy giants in the same study shipped 24.5 times more, with earnings spread more evenly across the wood companies than in steel. The ten also sold the widest export range of any industry surveyed, spanning firewood and sawn boards through to plywood, panels, doors, windows, parquet, and mouldings.
Every cubic metre leaves the country as a processed product, with Kyiv extending its decade-old ban on raw log exports through a zero export quota when the moratorium’s first ten years ran out on 1 November.
“A necessary step to take care of people in winter,” then-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said of the extension, with a draft timber market law now set to hold the ban through martial law and for ten years beyond it.
Poland leads the buying in nearly every category, joined by Germany, Romania, and Italy on firewood, by Turkey and Moldova on sawn timber, and by the Netherlands and Lithuania on plywood. Buyers in France, the UK, and Sweden take the finished joinery and building products carrying the highest added value.
It comes as the European Commission rated Russia and Belarus high risk under the EUDR country benchmarking in May 2025, leaving Ukraine inside the low-risk tier alongside most of its competitors. Demand has held even as sanctioned Russian birch ply continues to slip into European ports via third countries.
For all that buying, Polish authorities have also stopped Ukrainian timber at the border over concerns about conflict wood. Kyiv is meanwhile cleaning up its own trade, cracking a forged waybill export racket in March as the Zelenskyy government pushes to end the so-called “gray wood” traffic.
YC.Market released its rankings on 11 July, and according to the study’s numbers, a single Polish-owned plant in Vinnytsia accounts for one in every five hryvnia that wartime Ukraine’s ten biggest wood exporters earned abroad last year.
