5.1 Plywood
5.2 Particleboard
5.3 Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF)
5.4 Hardboard
5.5 Conclusion
In short, plywood is the major product of China's wood-based panel industry. Its production and consumption will increase at a rapid speed with substantial growth in volume of import to mitigate China's shortage of large diameter logs. The increasing demand of plywood import into the Chinese market will, on one hand, promote the development of the world's plywood industry especially in those countries (e.g.: tropical African countries) which have rich forest resources but less developed wood processing industries, and on the other hand, produce direct and more and more greater impact on the world plywood market, the pricing trend in particular.
In the quite distant future, the general trend of development shall be featured by appropriate growth in demand and supply in China's particleboard market. However, its pace of development is slower than that of plywood due to its disadvantaged product quality and scope of application compared to plywood. Furthermore, it is impossible to import large volume of particleboard because of the relatively low domestic price for particleboard. Meanwhile, export trade of particleboard is unlikely to witness substantial increase as quality of the domestically made particleboard is not high with weak competitive power for export. This is proven by the unchanging trend of production and consumption projected in this study and the unchanging projected volume of particleboard import and export calculated by using simulation in light of the actual volume of particleboard import and export over the past years.
There is no doubt that MDF production in China will experience fairly rapid development in the quite distant future. Anyhow, the magnitude of development will be unlikely great in a short run due to its low starting point of development. In addition, enormous investment required for MDF production objectively restricts MDF production from rapid development. Furthermore enormous investment, large energy consumption, high cost for MDF production and high price in the domestic market make it impossible to have substantial increase in MDF export. In overseas countries, development of MDF is not as fast as that of particleboard which indicates that it is not possible for China to import MDF products in large quantity especially in consideration of the high price. This study has an interesting conclusion after adjusted outlook simulation that China's import and export of MDF products will decrease slightly after 2005.
In the quite distant future, hardboard production in China will experience development at a slow pace. Despite of the fact that the quality of hardboard is lower than that of plywood, its low price makes it widely applicable in such fields which require light carrying capacity, moderate quality (e.g.: as the bottom and back panels of furniture, components of mobile panel houses) and simple packaging.
Comprehensive analysis of the production and consumption of various wood-based panel products after the year 2000 and especially by the year 2010 comes to the conclusion that the demand/supply ratio of various wood-based panel products in China by the year 20101 will roughly be:
Plywood: Particleboard: MDF: Hardboard = 8:4:2:1
1 The plywood ratio at over 50% of total panels may prove difficult to find affordable supplies for. Large logs are becoming more difficult to find in countries which traditionally export plywood. A shift to substitute panels, such as OSB, may occur. (Editor).
This ratio is in consistence with the qualitative analysis described in this section.
