Products from rubber wood of Vietnam are exported to over 100 markets

Rubber wood plays an increasing important role in wood processing sector of Vietnam as it has a definitely clear and legitimate origin.

The turnover of wood and wood products made of rubber wood has reached nearly US$ 2.4 billion, and it has many chances to grow in the near future.

In a report on associate consumption of rubber wood of smallholders, conducted by Forest Trend in collaboration with the Vietnam Rubber Research Institute and the Vietnam Rubber Association, rubber wood is considered as one of the most important domestic raw material supply of Vietnam's wood industry.

The rubber planting areas in Vietnam is the fifth largest in the world, reached 926,000 hectares by 2020. Wood is the end product in the whole production cycle of rubber tree.

After the basic growing period, latex harvesting period usually lasts 25 - 30 years. And when the rubber tree become old, leading to a decrease in latex output, it is sawed down and becomes a source of input materials for the wood processing industry. In addition, some rubber areas are cut down after 25 years of latex harvesting due to land use change.

In the period 2015 - 2019, the amount of wood harvested from liquidated rubber areas is quite large, averaging 5.5 million m3 per year.

The supply of rubber wood for Vietnam's wood industry includes timber from smallholder, large plantations and imported timber. In 2019, the supply from large plantations and smallholders domestically accounted for 99% of the total supply of rubber wood. Imported rubber wood accounted for a very small proportion, about 1%.

The domestic supplies of rubber wood have clear and legitimate origins, high quality, multi purposes and are consumed to produce variety products suitable for export and domestic markets. That makes rubber wood becoming more and more important supply in the wood processing industry. Each year, 87% of harvested rubber wood are used to produce export products, the rest is use in domestic production.

“In 2020, the value of export products made from rubber wood reached nearly US$ 2.4 billion, a double increase as of 2015,” statistics of the Vietnam Rubber Association shows. And the market trend helps export turnover of rubber wood made products increasing continuously, from 73.8% in 2017 to 81.6% in 2020. Meanwhile, there is a decrease in export turnover of rubber wood materials.

In recent years, the contribution of rubber wood to the export turnover of Vietnam's wood industry is about 20%. Although the export value of rubber wood is still increasing, its proportion of total wood export turnover has decreased slightly. The reason is that the supply of rubber wood has a slower growth rate than the export turnover of the whole wood industry.

So far, Vietnam exports rubber wood products to more than 100 markets. In 2019, the leading markets were the US, Japan, South Korea and Canada, accounting for 90.9% of the total export turnover of Vietnam's rubber wood products, of which the US market was the largest, accounted for 71.9% and reached more than US$ 1.3 billion.

South Korea, China, Japan, the US and Belgium are 5 biggest import markets of Vietnam’s rubber wood materials, accounted for 88.1% of the total export turnover in 2019, of which South Korea imported much, accounted for 72.9%.