Timber marketing plans

Press, 22 October 1984, Page 4

Timber marketing plans

From

ROY VAUGHAN

in Kyoto

A 10 year marketing exercise is planned by the New Zealand forest industry in an endeavour to break into Japan’s lucrative construction and housing industry. Although radiata pine has now been approved by the Japanese authorities for structural framing, exporters have had difficulty in selling it for this purpose. The big marketing push was announced by a forest industry spokesman, Mr A. R, Mac Gibbon, the general manager of Canterbury Timber Products, Ltd, at the Japan-New Zealand Business Council conference at Kyoto this week.

He believes there is a rapidly growing market for pine in Japams “2 by 2” method of house construction, but he said it would require the elimination of inborn prejudices against the use of radiata pine as a structural grade timber.

The New Zealand timber industry also wants the Japanese authorities to give New Zealand pine a machine stress grading and simplify building permit applications for its use.

Mr Mac Gibbon envisagesan education programme for Japanese builders in its use.

Radiata pine has been taking some hard knocks on the Japanese market recently and the New Zealand

timber industry already has plans to diversify into added value products such as kitset furniture, fibreboard and even pine plywood. "One New Zealand comKy at least has estabed a foothold in Japan with its solid do-it-yourself style furniture, targeted at the 25 to 40 age group, and furniture components for more traditional products,” he said.

New Zealand now supplies Japan with 90 per cent of its crating timber needs but here, as in other areas where timber is exported in the raw or near raw form, it is being squeezed out of markets by cheap timber from North America, Russia, and Chile.

Unless New Zealand is

able to boost its timber exports and develop new products it could end up exporting less than 300,000 cu. m of timber a year to Japan, according to the director of the Japanese timber company, Toyo Menka Kaisha, Ltd, Mr Shinji Matsumoto. Last year New Zealand exporteu 582,000 cubic metres of timber and this year he predicts it could fall to about 400,000 cubic metres largely because of competition from other timber exporters and a slump in Japan’s housing industry.

Some 1.91 million new Japanese homes were built in 1973 but now only about 1.1 million a year were being constructed, he said.