China's wood-based panel industry accelerates transformation and upgrading

Wood is one of the four major building materials alongside steel, cement, and plastic. It is the only renewable and important material with kinship. It can be widely used in furniture manufacturing, wood floor construction, interior decoration, building decoration, medium and high-grade materials. Vehicle and ship decoration, handicraft products, advanced audio, musical instruments and electronic industries and other fields. The demand for wood resources is closely related to the basic needs of human beings - the need for "housing" in clothing, food, housing and transportation, and is a long-term sustainable demand. However, the resource utilization efficiency of natural wood products is very low, and the wood-based panel products are made of forest wastes such as the three leftovers in the forest area and the second-smallest fuelwood as raw materials, which greatly improves the comprehensive utilization rate of wood resources and meets the needs of consumers. , which solves the contradiction between resources and development well, and is of great significance to alleviating the shortage of timber resources in China, comprehensively utilizing timber resources and protecting the ecological environment.

In recent years, China has proposed a development strategy of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality". As an extension of the utilization of forest resources, wood-based panel products are an integral part of the carbon cycle of the forest ecosystem and an important carrier for the flow of carbon storage. positive meaning. With the gradual establishment of a low-carbon circular development economic system, the wood-based panel industry, as a typical industry of circular economy, will gain more development opportunities.

Industry development stage

China is the largest country in the world in the production, consumption and import and export of wood-based panels, with an annual production and consumption of about 300 million cubic meters of wood-based panels. However, China's wood-based panel industry faces problems such as high pressure on the supply of wood resources, serious environmental protection and production safety problems, low market concentration, unreasonable structure and fierce homogenization competition, and there is still huge room for improvement and upgrading. With the continuous advancement of China's supply-side structural reform, the continuous improvement of environmental protection standards and the increasingly strict supervision and supervision, China's wood-based panel industry follows the development trend, seeks endogenous growth drivers, and gradually shifts from total expansion to structural optimization. Quality development.

In the past five years, China's wood-based panel industry has continued to eliminate outdated production capacity, the level of intelligent production of the whole line has gradually improved, and the industry concentration has been further improved; the proportion of low-formaldehyde emission products and formaldehyde-free wood-based panel products has increased significantly, and the variety structure has been continuously optimized; environmental protection facilities have been upgraded. The transformation continues to advance, the wood-based panel industry in economically developed areas continues to transfer to areas with higher environmental carrying capacity and more abundant wood resources, and the industrial layout is further rationalized.

In 2021, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has entered the stage of normalized prevention and control, and the world economy is gradually recovering. However, due to the combined influence of multiple factors such as the turmoil in the domestic real estate market and the continuous rise in the price of bulk chemical raw materials, the wood-based panel industry is faced with the huge challenges of surging costs and shrinking demand. . With the proposal of China's "carbon peak, carbon neutrality" strategy, the wood-based panel industry, as an important carrier for the flow of carbon storage in the forest ecosystem, is also facing new opportunities by virtue of its unique advantages such as low processing energy consumption and environmental friendliness. with the new development trend.

Industry Landscape and Trends

1. The industrial transfer is accelerated, and the production layout is further rationalized.

Raw material supply, coordinated development of upstream and downstream industries, and logistics and transportation are the main considerations for the layout of wood-based panel enterprises. China has completely stopped the commercial logging of natural forests in 2017, and in July 2019 officially approved the implementation of the "Technical Specification for Pollution Discharge Permit Application and Issuance of Wood-based Panel Industry" (HJ1032-2019), China's wood-based panel industry is gradually emerging The trend of shifting from north to south, from areas with weak environmental carrying capacity to areas with high environmental carrying capacity. As of 2020, the top five provinces (regions) in wood-based panel production accounted for 79.4% of the total output of wood-based panels in China, and the production layout was further rationalized. Among them, Guangxi, with its rich fast-growing eucalyptus resources and high environmental carrying capacity, continued to become a man-made panel. hotspot for board development.

2. Industry integration, scale effect, and industry concentration improvement are inevitable trends in the wood-based panel industry.

At present, China's wood-based panel industry has an overall overcapacity, and on the other hand, the effective supply of mid-to-high-end products is obviously insufficient. The supply and demand relationship of wood-based panels is unbalanced at different levels. The bottleneck of resources and refined management has existed for a long time, and the market concentration is still low. Under the normalization of epidemic prevention and control, the development of customized, personalized and diversified market demands on the consumer side has accelerated, and the development of high-end market and environmentally friendly products has accelerated. Therefore, through industry integration, outdated production capacity has been eliminated, economies of scale have been achieved, and product and management systems have been improved. Upgrading is an inevitable trend in the development of the wood-based panel industry. In the process of industry consolidation, brand enterprises build their own high-end production capacity, or acquire and merge small and medium-sized enterprises, carry out equipment upgrades and transformations, export management, brand and technology, and continue to expand their market shares, so as to achieve bigger and stronger industry concentration. upgrade, while the product structure is optimized.

3. The production technology of lightweight and high-strength wood-based panels is gradually mature, and it is expected to replace part of the plywood market space.

Plywood is the largest type of wood-based panel consumption in China, accounting for more than 60%. However, due to the high requirements for wood raw materials used in plywood production, with the implementation of China's comprehensive ban on logging of natural forests, the plywood industry is faced with the needs of Difficulty in reducing the number of large diameter logs and rising prices. How to reduce the quality of the board and at the same time make the material better and more environmentally friendly has become an increasingly important issue in the industry. In addition, lightweight materials have become easier in design, transportation, inventory, assembly, etc. There is no doubt that it has good development prospects. The performance indicators of light and high-strength products such as veneerable oriented strand board and super-strength particle board developed in recent years are close to or even higher than that of plywood. With the gradual application of new lightweight wood-based panels to industries such as furniture manufacturing and interior decoration, consumers' recognition of them continues to increase, and it is expected to replace some of the plywood market space in the future.

4. Information technology is continuously applied in the production process of wood-based panels, and the production mode will undergo major changes.

Changes in consumers' consumption habits such as product safety, quality, traceability and personalized needs will lead to changes in the production model, and the production of wood-based panels will be transformed from a production-oriented industry to a service-oriented industry, and the trend of upstream and downstream industrial chain collaboration will become more obvious. With the development of mobile Internet technologies such as 5G, the digital economy will empower the transformation and development of traditional wood-based panels, the Industrial Internet will change the traditional production and management methods of wood-based panels, and the Industrial Internet will receive active attention and applications in the wood-based panel industry. , to achieve a major change in the connection between the production and sales of wood-based panels.