Furniture Makers Short Of Timber

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30530, 27 August 1964, Page 9

Furniture Makers Short Of Timber

Canterbury furniture i takers were facing an acute shortage of imported timber, particularly mahogany, a co-director of Ellerm Bros, and Montgomery Ltd., city furniture manufacturers (Mr C. N. Ellerm) said yesterday.

“We have been completely out of mahogany for six weeks,” he said. “We have had a headache keeping the place going. Ninety-five per cent of the furniture ordered is in mahogany.”

The mahogany, which came from Ghana, was urgently needed for bedroom suites and occasional furniture, such as cocktail cabinets, china cabinets, tallboys and coffee tables.

If more and larger supplies of mahogany could not be obtained more readily from Ghana, Christchurch people would have to accept particle board veneered timber as an alternative, he said. Importers of timber from Ghana had told furniture makers that the mahogany supply had tightened up considerably. “If I could land 100,000 super feet of mahogany in Christchurch tomorrow, I could sell it in just half an hour by talking on the telephone,” said Mr Ellerm. Order Turned Down *We have just had a 30,000 super feet order turned down because the importers could not place the order in Ghana.” Another major problem in getting mahogany from Ghana to New Zealand, he

■said, was the lack of direct shipping. Shipments had to be unloaded at Singapore and trans-shipped to New Zealand. The first boat from Singapore to New Zealand could take anywhere from three months to six months. Mr Ellerm said that his company had an order of about 25,000 super feet of mahogany coming in next week. This order was placed 12 months ago. “At our present rate of consumption we will be out of timber again before Christmas,” he said. From a business point of view, said Mr Ellerm, it was not practicable to get sufficient orders for furniture to cover a period 12 months ahead. Most other Canterbury furniture manufacturers were in the same critical imported timber position as his company, he said. Mr Ellerm said he understood the shortage of supply of mahogany from Ghana had been aggravated by floods causing railway wash-outs.